Scott Yang's Playground

In one of the project at work we have been using OpenOffice.org running in headless mode to do document format conversions in the background, i.e. converting to and from various MS Office formats OpenDocument formats and PDF. One problem of using standalone OpenOffice.org installation as backend is that you can only run one instance at [...]

Download Squad: OpenOffice.org 3.0 coming Monday, download it today. From the list of OO.o mirrors, AussieHQ and PacificNet already have 3.0 binaries there (dated 6 Oct). Time to download and upgrade! (and more work for me to support ODF 1.2 at work)…

Jon Schwartz of Sun argues for Open Document Format on his blog + a ODF plugin for MS Office that has just been released by Sun as well. “Durability of information and file formats is exceptionally important to institutions or businesses with document retention policies that extend beyond the useful life of the software (and [...]

Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet suggested Mozilla should take over OpenOffice.org because of OO.o’s slow development. I think he is either out of his mind, or doing a “John Dvorak” style link bait (which I have bitten). For one, OpenOffice.org is leaps ahead of Office 97 — I’ll even argue that it is better than Office [...]

NeoOffice, the OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X with a UI developed in Java, has released the Aqua beta to their supporters. NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta is our first full Aqua release and uses native Aqua menus, file open and save dialogs, print dialogs, buttons, scrollbars, and many other native Aqua user interface elements. What is [...]

OpenOffice.org is supporting Microsoft’s campaign of getting legitimate software, by proclaiming that you can get legal and free at the same time — by using OpenOffice.org! I can proudly say that I have not personally paid for a single copy of Microsoft Office in my entire lifetime — I have been using StarOffice 3 since [...]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released, for Windows, Linux and Solaris. Many bugs I have submitted are still pending (mostly OD<->MS Office related), but still, well done guys! Download them at the nearest mirror.

Microsoft might support OpenDocument if there is enough customer demand. OpenDocument is an OASIS standard, submitted to ISO, and is the standard file format for the up-coming OpenOffice.org 2. Way to go, Microsoft, and please show us how you will embrace the standard! However, if native PDF support in Office 12 can be regarded as [...]

NeoOffice/J 1.1 has just been released. Based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 code base, NeoOffice/J runs on Mac OS 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4. Lots of improvement since the last major release, and it has been very stable for us. Use the torrent here to grab your own copy.

Having used OpenOffice.org 1.9.62 for the last couple of days (while m65 has just been made public today), I gotta say that the up-coming OpenOffice.org 2 is really impressive. Functionality wise it has quite a lot of enhancement, and is already far exceeding my needs. Visual wise it looks great – no more “emulated” user [...]

OpenOffice.org has turned 4, since Sun acquired StarOffice on 13 Oct 2000. Being a happy StarOffice user since version 3 on OS/2, it has completely fulfilled my productivity suite need. Happy birthday!

Apparently OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 has been released with the latest bug fixes. Quite a few fixes on MS Word docs crashing OO.o, according to release notes. Sounds like I’ll be downloading that tonight.

There is a review of OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b, the recently released beta for the new release of OpenOffice.org, i.e. the one I was eagerly waiting for as it (supposedly) fixed a table height bug that affects conversion between SXW and DOC. The review is pretty no frills – showing each of the OOo components without talking [...]

Three days ago I downloaded 120Mb of NeoOffice/J 0.8 by Patrick Luby, and has been playing around it for a while. Now I decided that OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 for Mac/X11 is no longer useful for me, as Neo does pretty much the same thing plus more – without the burden of running an X server. It [...]

Well. Just checked the OpenOffice.org web page, and it seems to happen during the weekend. OpenOffice.org goes Gold Master, from trinity.neooffice.org. What has been released is the OpenOffice.org X11 1.0.3, i.e. it requires an X11 server running as it is not a native Aqua application. It is a huge 169.57Mb download which comes with the [...]