

LibreOffice 4.2 released - chris_wot
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-2-new-features-and-fixes/

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computer
I know that the LibreOffice team is short on manpower, but I still find it
puzzling that they do not treat reproducible crashes as release-blocking bugs.
Instead, there are a lot of such bug reports untouched, potentially waiting to
be exploited by bad people. (I reported 2 such bugs myself, neither has been
fixed yet I think)

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yuhong
Not all crashes are exploitable.

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devcpp
Still not exactly ready for production environments. The lack of a decent and
reliable word processor is a big argument against Linux in non-programming
offices. That's too bad, because there's a lot of money and influence there
and the privacy argument would otherwise be a strong advantage for Linux.

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01Michael10
This being a more major update, I won't touch my LibreOffice install until
4.2.1 is released at the earliest.

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mcherm
I hope you mean 4.2.1. There might be a long wait for 4.21. <wink/>

~~~
01Michael10
Oops... I updated my comment and up voted yours.

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davidgerard
Also of interest: the developer-focused improvements in the LO codebase up to
4.2, by Michael Meeks.

[https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-01-30-under-
the-...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-01-30-under-the-
hood.html)

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gcr
Great release from the Libreoffice team, as usual!

LibreOffice might not be the "Snazziest" or whatever, but it's perfect for
folks like me who need to use MS office but don't use Windows and can't stand
Google's web UI.

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bovermyer
I applaud LibreOffice's intent, but the interface reminds me too much of
Office 2003 and older.

What happened that Microsoft has the most modern-looking office software?

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username42
Word 2002 is still the standard where I work mainly because of the insane UI
change of Microsoft.

Why would LibreOffice copy Microsoft when its main compelling advantage over
Microsoft is to avoid this mess ?

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klancaster
I use OO/Libre Office in part just because they did not follow MS' lead on the
ribbon. I have never found the ribbon intuitive personally.

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viraptor
> Added a new formula interpreter to enable massive parallel calculations of
> formula cells using GPU via OpenCL.

I'm genuinely interested in what kind of spreadsheets have a noticeably faster
response when getting processed on a GPU instead of CPU. ... actually it's the
same kind of interest as "what does a train wreck in slow motion look like".

~~~
chris_wot
OpenCL is actually a framework that allows a program to execute across
heterogeneous platforms. That includes CPU and GPUs. It will improve
spreadsheet tasks (which often use a lot of calculations that can be offloaded
to a GPU) for those who don't even have a GPU.

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OlivierLi
I think the most interesting thing about this release is the use of OpenCL.

With more and more popular applications using GPGPU techniques it's possible
that normal users will start noticing the difference soon.

~~~
davidgerard
What I'd really like to see is benchmarks between LO 4.2, MSO 2013 and Office
365. Maybe AOO 4.0.1 as well. Benchmark some serious spreadsheets, the sort
that take hours to run. I don't expect LO to win, but I do expect the results
will be interesting and give areas to improve upon now they've got the Calc
data structures sorted out.

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mariuz
One of the preview feature in 4.2 contributed by Andrzej Hunt is Firebird SQL
C++ backend for Base
[http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=9109](http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=9109)

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cowmix
Wow... the docx support has really seemed to improve with this release.

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nailer
I don't know much about Libreoffice, but I created Python DocX and am familiar
with the spec.

The Office Open XML spec refers to the behaviour of old versions of MS office
as the correct way to render certain options. Without access to the source
code of say, MS Office 97, alternate renderers need to reverse engineer the
correct behaviour.

~~~
tzs
(Pasted from an earlier discussion)

That's not correct. What it actually does is reserve some markup for use by
third parties that have reverse engineered various old programs (including
programs that competed with Microsoft programs), so that if those people have
workflows that depend on features of those old programs that cannot be
represented in OOXML, they can still use OOXML as a storage format but add in
the extra information they need.

Here's the use case this is aimed at. Suppose I run, say, a law office, and
we've got an internal document management system that does things like index
and cross reference documents, manage citation lists, and stuff like that. The
workflow is based on WordPerfect format (WordPerfect was for a long time the
de facto standard for lawyers).

Now suppose I want to start moving to a newer format for storage. Say I pick
ODF, and start using that for new documents, and make my tools understand it.
I'd like to convert my existing WordPerfect documents to ODF. However, there
are things in WordPerfect that cannot be reproduced exactly in ODF, and this
is a problem. If my tools need to figure out what page something is on, in
order to generate a proper citation to that thing, and I've lost some
formatting information converting to ODF, I may not get the right cite.

So what am I going to do? I'm going to add some extra, proprietary markup of
my own to ODF that lets me include my reverse engineered WordPerfect knowledge
when I convert my old documents to ODF, and my new tools will be modified to
understand this. Now my ODF workflow can generate correct cites for old
documents. Note that LibreOffice won't understand my additional markup, and
will presumably lose it if I edit a document, but that's OK. The old documents
I converted should be read-only.

Of course, I'm not the only person doing this. Suppose you also run a law
office, with a WordPerfect work flow, and are converting to an ODF work flow.
You are likely going to add some proprietary markup, just like I did. We'll
both end up embedding the same WordPerfect information in our converted legacy
documents, but we'll probably pick different markup for it. It would be nice
if we could get together, make a list of things we've reverse engineered, and
agree to use the same markup when embedding that stuff in ODF.

And that's essentially what they did in OOXML. They realized there would be
people like us with our law offices, who have reverse engineered legacy data,
that will be extending the markup. So they made a list of a bunch of things
from assorted past proprietary programs that were likely to have been reverse
engineered by various third parties, and reserved some markup for each.

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ape4
Lets hear it for better RTF support!

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arca_vorago
I really like LibreOffice, which I switched to from open office a few years
ago (and Star Office before that). My main issue is that I would love to
transition users over to it, but they complain that it messes up formatting
(lots of spreadsheets), so while just about everything else my users do could
be done on GNU/linux, most of the end-user workstations still wallow in
windows land, due to office alone. This release seems to have some massive
improvements for businesses as well.

I will probably send MS a gift once they finally release Office for *nix.

