Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LibreOffice 6.1 released

blog.documentfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 86 posts

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#51

Post by mmastrac »

mksaunders wrote: post #43
sjmulder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why we're being singled out :-) Didn't mean no harm or to single you guys out. You're doing fantastic work. But broken and noncompliant notices do bother me a bit. Sorry to drag on like this but the privacy statement (thanks for linking) says: takes place only with the consent of the user It does not, as there appears to be a second cookie notice underneath the first stating how consent is assumed: We use on…

Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it on to the website team :-)

Don't let comments on Hacker News unduely influence your website decision making. The issues raised here tend to be laser focused on things that likely won't correlate with your success in the market.

You'll never be able to please everyone so your ability to study and run experiments is key. If anything, it sounds like you are doing things exactly the right way.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#52

Post by mksaunders »

jhasse wrote: post #44
mksaunders wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it this way: * If we had a bad website, people would complain that it's ineffective, and not helping drive people towards FOSS * If we then add open source analytics tools to try to improve the site, people ask why we are "tracking" them * If we then add a banner, people complain that we're training people to ignore banners ...so it's hard to get anything right, it seems! We could remove Piwik completely (alt…

You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website. > We could remove Piwik completely Yes, please do that. > But then it'd be much harder to improve our website. Why?

> You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website.

But that's not what I said at all. Please don't just thrown in things like that. I said that analytics tools can be really useful in many ways to help to improve a website (especially a bad one).

You ask "why", well look here at the features that the open source tool we use provides: https://matomo.org/features/

I'm not sure if you've worked in website design before but many of those features are very important and effective for improving a website. If we want to spread the word about FOSS, and encourage more people to use it, shouldn't we try to make the best website we can? While also informing users about the open source tools we use, and having a clear privacy policy about them?

https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/privacy/privacy-policy-...

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#53

Post by jhasse »

mksaunders wrote: post #52
jhasse wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website. > We could remove Piwik completely Yes, please do that. > But then it'd be much harder to improve our website. Why?

> You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website. But that's not what I said at all. Please don't just thrown in things like that. I said that analytics tools can be really useful in many ways to help to improve a website (especially a bad one). You ask "why", well look here at the features that the open source tool we use provides: https://matomo.org/features/ I'm not sure if…

Well you put up the three bullet points making it sound like that these are the only options, sorry that I misunderstood you.

> You ask "why", well look here at the features the open source tool we use provides: https://matomo.org/features/

That's more about about why one should use Piwik instead of a different tracking tool.

> shouldn't we try to make the best website we can?

Sure. And IMHO the benefit of not having a banner / tracking outweigh the cons.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#54

Post by jawilson2 »

zouhair wrote: post #48
kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

Maybe you want to give Lyx[0] a try. [0]: https://www.lyx.org/

I miss using lyx and latex so much. I used it for my dissertation, and used mercurial for version tracking (this was 2008-2009, when mercurial and git were still neck and neck). When I updated an analysis and got new results, it triggered a rebuild of the thesis with new plots and descriptions. I had more than a year of history showing how the results progressed. Word docs can't approach this.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#55

Post by kqr »

WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #14
mksaunders wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does the Document Foundation need to track me? It's not "tracking" (in the sense of monitoring what you do on other sites). On the LibreOffice website, we use the open source stats tool Matomo (formerly Piwik) to get an overview of how people use the site, how people go from one page to another, so that we can improve it. Lots of FOSS projects do this. Also, as explained in the privacy policy, JavaScript is req…

1. What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site. 2. Your privacy policy contains: > !!!add opt-out frame on the website at this position!!!

> What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site.

I'd argue you're being unfair with terminology here. People generally talk about tracking when referring to cookies and scripts that monitor what other sites users visit. Monitoring sessions on your own site is ethically distinct enough to warrant its own term: web analytics.

You may think these are bad terms that don't reflect the true nature of the issue, and I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it is not an excuse to willingly conflate the two without qualifying it.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#56

Post by zokier »

kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

I've been thinking that we need a new generation of word processors aimed for authoring blog posts (and wiki pages etc). Sure you and I might be happy editing markdown with vi (although honestly I'm not happu with that), but that is not really solution for wider usage.

Most features of word processors are equally applicable for web-style content, but somehow we ended up having completely separate ecosystem there.

One major issue hampering creation of such tool is the relative lack of standardization on the web. Every content platform has its own format and api etc, so making common tooling is difficult.

See also Windows Live Writer

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#57

Post by kqr »

vxNsr wrote: post #36
kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

People use word processors to write documents that can be easily edited by multiple people while still being easily readable the whole time. I'd be interested to know what product you use to compose your documents in.

In the absence of forced company policy, my experience of word processors have generally been one of rather poor compatibility. I assume company policies are what helps people interact through word processors?

I personally like Org to compose the copy of a document. It's a plain text format that makes sense to a lot of people, the reference implementation has most of the powerful features I'd miss from word processors, and it's reasonably easy to script missing advanced features.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#58

Post by kqr »

stronglikedan wrote: post #40
kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

I use word processors to specify complex systems. I can quickly navigate the document visually, without having to use Pandoc and its ilk to convert it to a format that's easy on the eyes. Other tools that live-preview markdown just aren't there yet. I also get a lot of automated functionality for complex structures like lists, tables, section numbering (in multiple formats) and tables-of-contents. I have really, real…

I am also of the opinion that for anything remotely resembling complexity, Markdown is very lacking.

But the things you mention are the things I do with Org and Emacs Org mode. Is that something you have tried?

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#59

Post by kqr »

geff82 wrote: post #27
kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

Excellent question. I have found that I need office suites less and less. The reason I still have an Office365 subscription is for Onedrive and Onenote, for the few remaining classic documents I use Libreoffice because I found that I almost never exchange pure .doc-files with anyone, so no focus on perfect compatibility is needed and I do not want to grow some dependency on Microsoft somehow (nothing against MS, I ju…

Letters! Good point! I'd probably still prefer having a letterhead template in Scribus and author in plain text, but I can totally see why most people would consider that overkill and instead use a word processor to combine the two tasks.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#60

Post by kqr »

kijin wrote: post #45
txcwpalpha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My professors would have been very confused if I had sent them anything other than .doc(x) for review. This, in particular, is the most important point. The parent commenter says "I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process". Well, in the vast majority of cases, .docx is the final production medium. Most people use MS Word as both a document editor and a document reader. I've worked…

Moreover, I think the trend you described will only become more popular as the world moves away from printed media. When STEM people think of a "final production medium", they usually think of articles in journals. But who reads paper journals anymore? Most people who are active in their fields don't even read PDFs of paper journals; they've already seen the preprints on arxiv. We're all just exchanging tarballs of s…

> The thing I like the best about Microsoft Word is the review feature. Multiple people can edit, annotate, and comment on specific parts of the same document. You can inspect each diff and either accept or reject it. Everything is color-coded and can be manipulated using a mouse. It's like commenting on a github commit, but much more intuitive for people whose job is to exchange human-readable documents, not source code.

This is an interesting perspective! I author in plain text, and when collaborating, I prefer using what's essentially the Phabricator code review workflow to elicit comments and improvements until the change is fixed.

Working with changes this way is useful in that it atomises and comparmentalises changes, so the history is easier to inspect after the fact. And so far, few people have found it unintuitive -- they don't even know it was designed for source code in the first place, they just like that it's clear what's expected of them at each step in the process.

I think sometimes it's easy to underestimate how good tools for programmers are, but it's easy to see why: in any field, if you want to find good tools, look at what the toolmaker has to use. I think a lot of people would prefer the programmer tools if given sufficient polish and the proper introduction.

Post reply on HN