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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#421

Post by gmueckl »

ModernMech wrote: post #413
gmueckl wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ribbons (in Office, at least) change that very hierarchy depending on window width. For example, take the Home bar in Word: the "Editing" and "Style" groups collapse to buttons with submenus before the width of the window is reduced to half screen width on my computer. This affects keyboard navigation in the ribbon bar, too, of course.

This doesn’t actually change the hierarchy of commands, as evidenced by the fact the keyboard shortcuts stay constant. I appreciate hiding these first before Font, since I use Font more than Styles or Editing.

What hierarchy is supposedly staying constant? Keyboard shortcuts have no hierarchy.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#422

Post by yencabulator »

lbwtaylor wrote: post #264
leonidasv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.

I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering. I only did a very brief demo of it, but I was not impressed.

I'd assume that's less of a "chose" and more of technical limitation caused by wanting to reuse all the legacy code.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#423

Post by ModernMech »

gmueckl wrote: post #421
ModernMech wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t actually change the hierarchy of commands, as evidenced by the fact the keyboard shortcuts stay constant. I appreciate hiding these first before Font, since I use Font more than Styles or Editing.

What hierarchy is supposedly staying constant? Keyboard shortcuts have no hierarchy.

Keyboard shortcuts for functions in the ribbon map directly to their placement in the ribbon hierarchy. Tab, section, subsection, etc. You press alt and then a series of one or more letters that define the path to that item.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#424

Post by listenallyall »

Const-me wrote: post #392
listenallyall wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no shortcut, that is an abomination. Basic Ctrl-V should be simple plain text paste. honestly, how often do you want the formatting from the source, vs. seamlessly matching the target?

> That is no shortcut, that is an abomination I can see how it's unusable on a laptop, on a full-size PC keyboard that's OK. > how often do you want the formatting from the source, vs. seamlessly matching the target? I don't write word documents unless I want rich text features. Just for text there's nothing wrong with plain text or markdown files. Copy-pasting from visual studio is the easiest way to apply good qual…

>> I don't write word documents unless I want rich text features.

Just for clarification, Paste as Plain Text doesn't paste an unformatted string, it blends with the target formatting. So for example if you are copying a phrase you copied off a web page into a Word doc where the current paragraph is 12pt Georgia, you get 12pt Georgia no matter what the formatting was on the original document. The default Paste will attempt to replicate the color, weight, font size and family of the original web page into your Word doc, which is highly unlikely to fit in with the rest of your document.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#425

Post by franga2000 »

hnarn wrote: post #88
ghaff wrote: post #51

There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared docu…

I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that…

I don't think making a web-based version would make sense for TDF. It would basically have to be done from scratch and OnlyOffice is already years ahead of them in that. Any attempt to port the existing code to the web also seems destined to fail (see Collabora).

What I think would really make LO stand out is strong collaboration support in the existing desktop editors. A self-hostable headless sync backend that streams real-time changes from and to everyone who has the document open would be even better than GDocs, which is notoriously slow due to being all in a browser.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#426

Post by coliveira »

ModernMech wrote: post #419
coliveira wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about the experience of someone who has learned the ribbon for a long time. Of course, if you always use the ribbon, it will be more familiar to you. Just like if you were taught Mandarin as a child it will be easier than speaking English. It has nothing to do with how easy it is to use these two different alternatives.

I didn’t have a hard time learning the ribbon. Going back to my original post, I just don’t see how it’s so inscrutable as others in these comments claim. Could it be that all these claims of the ribbon being a “much” harder are overblown? It honestly doesn’t seem so much different than a menu system to me, and again there are pros and cons for both. I think if you’re going to continue making this claim you should at…

It may also be that claims that the ribbon is easy to use are overblown, and are result of familiarity instead of any true advantage. If you want to claim that the ribbon is easier to use you should also quantify it, otherwise your personal claim is just an anecdote.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#427

Post by macspoofing »

mburns wrote: post #418
macspoofing wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I imagine the amount of money the US government already spends on MS Office could fund development of something as good or better than Office No, it can't. Microsoft lives and breaths Office 365 because that is a core part of their business. There is zero chance that a government will care as much about this as Microsoft does, or the 10,000 other companies that are trying to supplant incumbents. Add to that the fact…

Yes, it can. We have federally-funded national Research labs that regularly take on nuanced, technical challenges like this, and they work great. It's not like a federal bureaucracy designed and built multiple mars rovers, engineers did. >Add to that the fact that funding will be uneven, because if the tool achieves a 'good enough' status, why keep funding it If it is good enough, sure, it doesn't need the same amoun…

>We have federally-funded national Research labs that regularly take on nuanced, technical challenges like this, and they work great.

Not in commercial space. Government is good for funding cutting edge research with no obvious commercial benefit. That's a good role for government. Government is atrocious at competing with commercial offerings.

>It's not like a federal bureaucracy designed and built multiple mars rovers, engineers did.

Right now there is no way for private industry to do better than NASA because there is no clear commercial benefit and the money to develop potential commercial benefits are completely prohibitive. The missions that NASA engages in, from rovers on Mars, to New Horizons probe, to James Webb telescope are very important, and could not be done by private industry (though private industry is sub-contracted for many parts of those projects). That's a proper role for Government - identify gaps that the market has left but that have societal importance and fill then with funding from taxpayers.

>If it is good enough, sure, it doesn't need the same amount of funding required to get it to that point.

Word processing has been 'good enough' since 1995 - why isn't everyone using Office 95, or LibreOffice.

But you do demonstrate why government software projects fail - there is never and 'endpoint' (or 'good enough' point) to software. You're always updating based on market needs.

>Because we can spend less money building a thing once than renting it annually for decades and decades

I reject the assumption, it won't be cheaper to move off of Office. It won't be cheaper to build an alternative. Again, why isn't LibreOffice everywhere? The product is free. Why are companies paying for Office? Are they stupid? Maybe because there are hidden costs, from maintenance, deployment, collaboration with other sites, training, etc. that make using LibreOffice actually more expensive in practice than Office.

And by the way, for many companies, Google Suite has supplanted Office (which is typically a paid product). But again, somehow the fact that LibreOffice free, didn't translate to being competitive with that offering.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#428

Post by ModernMech »

coliveira wrote: post #426
ModernMech wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t have a hard time learning the ribbon. Going back to my original post, I just don’t see how it’s so inscrutable as others in these comments claim. Could it be that all these claims of the ribbon being a “much” harder are overblown? It honestly doesn’t seem so much different than a menu system to me, and again there are pros and cons for both. I think if you’re going to continue making this claim you should at…

It may also be that claims that the ribbon is easy to use are overblown, and are result of familiarity instead of any true advantage. If you want to claim that the ribbon is easier to use you should also quantify it, otherwise your personal claim is just an anecdote.

I'm not saying it's easier to use. I've said multiple times in this thread they seem just about the same to me. They're just two ways of displaying a hierarchy of functions. One way hides a lot of it in menus and takes up less room, the other way lays it out on the screen and takes up more room. I get a lot of work done in either interface. There are pros and cons to both. In the end I can write documents in both. I personally find it easier to discover new functionality in the ribbon, but I feel at peak competency they difference is a wash.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#429

Post by rbg246 »

nxc18 wrote: post #206
rbg246 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also the same, I have a complete block on how to find things, they just aren't where I remember even though as others have pointed out its 12 years since the ribbon appeared.

In 2020 there is a search feature (similar to VS Code) so there's really no need to have to find anything anyway.

Oh nice that will probably solve my dilemma on knowing what I want but not knowing where it is!

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#430

Post by akho »

listenallyall wrote: post #385
red_admiral wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

Paste as Plain Text should be the default. The inability to do so via the right-click context menu in Office (like Chrome allows) drives me nuts. Perhaps an exception if you are copying/pasting from the same document, although personally I'd still prefer plain text.

You can make it a default. It's under 'Advanced' in options.

Also, when you paste, Word shows a small button labeled 'Ctrl' — you can click it or press Ctrl, and adjust your paste.

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