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Kolbjørn Stuestøl wrote (30-11-13 21:48)
As this error occurs only in the 4.2 version perhaps it is a bug,
[...]
Yes, it's this one
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72022
Hi 
Pedro is right and i like his solution. People were/are happy to
download and install Adobe Acrobat to read PDFs.
The minor amendment i would make is that Doc is MUCH better for
interoperability than DocX. Doc is almost always smooth but i'm sure
it has it's occasional problems. DocX often seems to have problems
just as Rtf never achieved MS's promise of being an interoperable
format either. Doc used to have much more trouble but MS seem to be
doing a lot less to develop it now that it's not the default format in
MS Office now so it's settled into being a smooth and fairly reliable
stepping stone between many different programs.
However ODF is a lot more secure and each of the different versions
has been fully documented. All the various programs that use ODF
implement it as per the written spec except where bug-reports have
been posted against the app to "flag-up" divergence. LO and OO add a
little more functionality to the 1.2 standard and have written that up
as "1.2 (Extended)" and have presumably pushed that to the OASIS
consortium to be included in the next update to the format even though
that is likely to be many years away.
https://www.oasis-open.org/
OASIS developed the format, not Sun, not TDF, not Oracle and not
Apache. The consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing
over 600 organizations and individual members in more than 65
countries. TDF is in that 5,000 but so is IBM and even Microsoft.
Many other programs use ODF;
AbiWord
Adobe Buzzword
Apache OpenOffice
Atlantis Word Processor
Calligra Suite
Corel WordPerfect Office X6
Evince
Google Drive (was Google Docs)
Gnumeric
IBM Lotus Symphony
Inkscape exports .odg
KOffice
LibreOffice
Microsoft Office 2007 (from service pack 2 release) - errr but badly
and breaks spreadsheets
Microsoft Office 2010 - errr also badly and still breaks spreadsheets
Microsoft Office 2013
Microsoft SkyDrive / Office Web Apps
NeoOffice
Okular
OpenOffice.org
Scribus imports .odt and .odg
SoftMaker Office
Sun Microsystems StarOffice
WordPad 6.1 (Windows 7) partial support.
Zoho Office Suite
Regards from
Tom
Hi
Errr, just to highlight the point that while i think Doc (NOT DocX) is
the best format for file-sharing right now it is not a good
future-proof format for long-term storage. ODF is better for storage
because it's implementation is closer to the specifications drawn up
as it's ISO standard.
In 20-30 years or even longer it is likely to be much easier to throw
together something to read all documents saved in ODF format. Doc and
DocX implementations are too far from their written specs and too
variable across different versions of MS Office.
Regards from
Tom
learning how to use the ribbon takes MUCH less time than manually
reformatting years worth of files that you must keep using.
Yes, a charity with just some tens of SIMPLE files they just reuse all
the time will spend less time/money installing LO/AOO on their only
available computer than learning the ribbon AND buying a new pc just
to use the newest MSO.
Whereas any other similar group which had just a few more files, and
just some macros and idiotic, uselessly complex formatting here and
there, and maybe is working off the personal laptops of its volunteers
who just pirate everything anyway... will spend much less total
time/money in learning the ribbon than converting all its document.
THAT's what I meant by "maintaining/re-learning", sorry if it wasn't
clear.
Marco
Hi
Retraining to use the ribbon-bar is easier than reformating tons of
documents but why reformat them? It's possible to keep the old
version of MS Office and install LibreOffice alongside it.
Then new things can be gradually moved to LibreOffice. Migration
rather than switch-over.
The LibreOffice menus are more similar to the old style MS Office 2003
menus. The ribbon-bar changes with each new release of MS Office. So
even after retraining to use the ribbon-bar it guarantees having to do
more retraining later on. So in the short-term it might be less
disruptive but in the longer term it means periodic disruption.
Moving to LibreOffice makes the longer-term easier.
Regards from
Tom
sorry Tom but... do you need that **I** don't know this stuff, or
would be against it? I am talking of how the rest of the world thinks,
not us already on lists like this.
Marco
Hi
We don't all agree on anything very much. It's only through
discussions that we arrive at a mutual understanding. One of the
great things about FOSS, imo, is that we can all have very different
ideas about how to do things and yet work together. It's often
precisely because someone thinks differently that things can move
forwards and avoid getting stale.
I think a few of us are finding our position about promotion of ODF is
changing as a result of one of these threads. People have put
forwards points that i hadn't thought about much before. Hopefully we
will reach a sensible position either this time or in a few weeks when
the issue crops up again after we've had change to absorb the points
and see how it plays out in the world around us.
Wrt migrations vs switch-over i think we need to be very strong and
quite forceful about migration being the better route. Switch-over is
the way the MS world does things and it means the slightest little
petty problem can be a major stumbling block. In the MS world the
user gets blamed and the onus is on the user to work it out or get
training. There is no choice offered. When people are trying to move
to FOSS it's those tiny bumps that leads to people giving up on FOSS.
If people migrate instead then they seldom even notice such hiccups,
it's all a lot smoother and they begin to realise that FOSS is better.
So i think we need to be quite quick to jump on it when people talk
about replacing MS Office with LibreOffice/OpenOffice and make it
clear that people can keep their old version of MS Office running
alongside.
Regards from
Tom
"Tom Davies":
...Rtf never achieved MS's promise of being an interoperable
format either.
RTF is just a textual dump of document structures. It is as close to lossless interchange format as it can be.
However ODF is a lot more secure
All text formats are secure as they do not contain machine-interpretable data.
and each of the different versions has been fully documented.
No way. Please link me some 'full documentation' of text:list-level-style-number@style:num-format attribute, for example.
Many other programs use ODF;
Apache OpenOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, LibreOffice, NeoOffice, OpenOffice.org, are the same software.
All others programs do not use it as a native format and do not support many of the features.
Alternatively send odf documents and tell users they can open these
file with m$o version>2010, but there will be differences. Ask users
to save odf documents and consider the comparison table for text
documents: