October 14, 2008

Native OpenOffice Is Finally Here

The continued progression of OpenOffice on the Mac platform is very exciting news for those who write and work on their Macs.

If you've not read previous comments on OpenOffice, it is the open source community initiative towards developing and improving an open platform software sweet that can replace the functionality of Micro$oft Office. I had been running NeoOffice, which provides a java wrapper to OpenOffice, allowing it to run well on newer Macs, but this new release of OpenOffice is in a fully Mac native version. I was excited about this when I first got the beta some time ago. Read here for some notes about the OpenOffice 3.0 Release and for download options.

OpenOffice is an excellent choice for some solutions. For instance, we have a Mac lab in our church... no need to buy Micro$oft Office for them all... we can now deploy OpenOffice at no cost. It opens many, many file formats, including the newest Office formats, so works great in an inter-office setting. You have nothing to lose in giving it a try... it's free!

4 comments:

Mike Aubrey said...

Joe - do you know how it does with right to left Hebrew?

Joe Weaks said...

Mike,
I had meant to mention this, as it is always important for our needs. Yes, OpenOffice does support R2L Unicode Hebrew, as did NeoOffice which is based on it. I have read that for advanced vowel pointings, the occasional problem can arise, but it has sufficed for my uses, which have been minimal.

Again... no cost to trying it out.

Mike Aubrey said...

Great, Its good to know.

A.D. Riddle said...

I was using NeoOffice 2.2 with Hebrew. It does support RTL. I was copy-pasting text from Accordance without accents & cantillation marks.

The only problems I noted are:
(1) Every once in a while, when I opened a file, one line of the Heb (not all of them) would begin further to the right than where I had set my margin. I would open the exact same file at another time and everything aligned correctly with the margins. I have no idea how to fix it.

(2) Occasionally a few letters would clump up and overlap. But same as before--at other times the letters would be sorted out correctly without me doing anything different.

(3) Sometimes there would be an extra space between the last word a verse and the soph pasuch. Except it wasn't really a space, because if I tried to delete anything in either direction I would delete part of my word or the soph pasuch. But again, this didn't happen all the time.

I will try 3.0 and see if some of this weird behavior sticks around. It is really strange because sometimes these problems would appear and other times they would not.