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OpenOffice 1.0 Writer at Work

By: bilbrey on 2002-05-22 09:22:56

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Section 1 - Getting started

First off, let's get OpenOffice 1.0 installed. Please note that I am writing herein about the Linux version of OpenOffice. I've briefly installed OO4Win, but that's not primarily my sandbox. From the OpenOffice.org 1.0 download page, download the ~67MB gzipped tarball. Then check it against the appropriate MD5 hash, and untar the file - here's an example of that:

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ wget \
> http://sf1.mirror.openoffice.org/1.0.0/OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
 ...

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ cat > md5sum.txt
24b64e79509f4e6b4e458fe35f82c762  OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
^D

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ md5sum OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz \
> | diff - md5sum.txt
bilbrey@garcia:~/download$

Several notes on the above routine are in order. In the wget and md5sum commands, I use the '\' (or backslash) character to continue the command line. While I can just type through and line wraps automatically in a terminal window, this makes the formatting here much nicer (and this trick also works in scripts, where readability is a useful trait). I got the appropriate md5 sum from the links on the download page, and pasted it into a file using the cat command, with minor modifications. That is, I removed a leading "1.0.0/" from the filename string that follows the md5 hash. In that way, when I use diff to tell me whether the md5 of the downloaded file and the standard match, it all works right. The purpose of doing the md5sum check in this manner is that I don't have to trust my eyes to compare two long strings of alphanumerics. Let the computer do what it does well, I say!


bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ cd ../temp

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp$ tar -zxf \
> ../download/OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp$ cd install

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp/install$ su
Password:Not_My_Password

root@garcia:/home/bilbrey/temp/install# ./setup -net

Above, I continued by untarring the downloaded file underneath one of my temp directories (I have lots of them, let me tell you!). Now, the plan here is to do what's called a network installation, meaning that the software is installed someplace in the Linux filesystem where many users can get to it. In order to do so, I need to be root, so that I have the necessary write permissions. The other alternative is to run a standard setup as a "normal" user. The drawback here is twofold. First, all of the StarOffice binaries, configurations and whatnot (all 200 megabytes worth) are installed in the user's home directory. Secondly, if any other user also wants to use/install in the same manner, they would have to do the exact same thing, and there goes another 200 megabytes. Even though there's just me on this system, I attempt to practice reasonable installation procedures, so I opted for the so-called network install. Another advantage is that you can optionally locate the program install in your NFS export tree, making it available to users across the network (the real reason for this type of install).

The setup is a graphical application, and requires that X be running, and that the root user have permission to access the running X process (so depending on your distribution's security setup, you may need to begin this process with an xhost +localhost command.

Now here's an important note: Do NOT accept the default installation location (directory). For me, it wanted to install in /root/OpenOffice.org1.0/, and that just won't do. The correct place is probably either /opt/ or /usr/local/. My preference is the latter. Other than that, you can pretty well just accept the defaults all the way through. Once installed, then you can exit back down to normal user status, and do the "workstation" install, like this:


root@garcia:/home/bilbrey/temp/install# exit
exit

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp/install$ /usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.0/setup

Only two bits of significance in the installer. First, explicitly select the Workstation install. This only uses about 1.5 megabytes in the user's home directory. Secondly, so far as I can tell, all the information that you have to fill in during the installer is for the personalization features of the program, not for any sort of online registration. That means be complete, so the info is there to let the program help you fill forms and formats out properly when you come to that stage of use. Finally, I asked it to install to ~/OpenOffice/ rather than some name with versioning in it. I'll make the (possibly silly) assumption that future version will upgrade the bits properly when the time comes.

Installed, OpenOffice put menu items in my KDE 3.0 menus. I'm told it also does so for KDE 2.X and Gnome. Other window managers, you're probably on your own. However, it's pretty easy to figure out. Type ~/OpenOffice/soffice (or whatever install path you chose in your home directory) and press enter to start the program. It comes up in Writer mode by default, but you can start new spreadsheets, presentations or drawings right from the File menu.

Now let's have a look at OpenOffice 1.0 Writer, in comparison to Microsoft Word.

Section 2 - The basis of comparison

It's only fitting that when I go on my journey of discovery to locate the marketing specifications for the word processing application from the dominent desktop software firm, I run into a little problem...

An error occured while loading
  http://www.microsoft.com/isapi/CTRedir.asp?type=CT
  &source=WWW&sPage=Flyout_S1_Node2|Left%20Nav||Office
  &tPage=/office/:

The process for the http://www.microsoft.com protocol died unexpectedly.

A browser refresh fixed that problem. I wonder which webserver software they're running? Mmmm. Anyway, it takes quite a bit of spelunking to get to something that faintly resembles a feature list. Oddly, it's a downloadable .doc format. And it took 4 attempts through unexpectedly dying protocols to get that document downloaded. Fortunately, I can open and read this "product guide" in OpenOffice. Odd, though, that I need to program to read marketing information about the program. (I'll note that they do offer "viewers" from a link on that page, but since I don't need it...) After all that effort, it's just a listing of the new or enhanced features for Word 2002 - Nothing that provides me with a basis for comparision. I'll just have to do a side-by-side comparison of the features that I think are significant.

OK, here's the drill. We'll compare MS Word 2000 against OpenOffice 1.0 Writer, paying special attention to features that interest me. I have spent a long, long time living in Word, and I'd like to know how easy this transition is going to be, so let's just dive right in and start comparing apples and apples.

Note: Microsoft and Microsoft Word 2000 are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation.

Section 3 - First Impressions

MS Word 2K sample screen

Figure 1 - MS Word 2K sample screen (thumbnail)

In this first thumbnailed image (click on Figure 1 to get the fullsize version in another window) is Microsoft Word 2000 showing a portion of the second chapter from the Linux Book that Tom Syroid and I wrote a couple of years back. At that time, our publisher required that we submit our primary manuscript in Word format. Apparently the irony missed them entirely. However, I'll grant that there are LOTS of useful tools for writers in the product from Redmond, including the following features:

OO Writer sample screen

Figure 2 - OO Writer sample screen (thumbnail)

At the time, we tried to work for a while with StarOffice 5.2. There were... problems. Now it's almost two years later, and the OpenOffice.org community has made vast improvements. Thumbnailed in Figure 2, you can see the identical document open in OpenOffice 1.0 Writer. In each screenshot you can see how some of the important features I've listed above are handled in the two word processors.

<rant>

Now, I'll get my big gripe out of the way, right away. OpenOffice apparently does not handle extended characters well. The control character section of ISO-8859-1 (codes at or above 0x80) was partially coopted extended and embraced by Microsoft way back in the mists of time, to yield such typographic nicities as "Smart Quotes" and other wonders. While these certainly have made some forms of printed documentation prettier, they do so at the expense of a non-standard implementation. Some Linux wordsmithing tools handle these better than others. It's not utterly clear to me why, in an Open Source arena, once someone has solved the problem, others don't just pick up the solution and adapt it to fit their needs. Sigh.

It's terrible to open a document and have it full of ? characters where a double quote or an extended hyphen should be found. This can be fixed, but I shouldn't have to do the work. And while there are a few bugs filed against this in the OpenOffice.org site, the coder/maintainer responses indicate a nearly complete lack of awareness about the problem and what might be done to fix it. I'm told there are ways to make the quotes work right, but I haven't found a reliable method yet. When I think I've configured it properly, it works once, then never again. Very confusing.

NOTE: This rant applies to the Linux and probably Solaris versions of OpenOffice. It's a fonts thing, because in the Windows version of OpenOffice, all these fancy enhanced characters just work. Feh!

</rant>

Pre-posting Note - there's been a lot of activity on the bugs that affect font handling and anti-aliasing. Apparently there's been a fix committed to CVS already. In the meantime, anyplace that you have a file called pspfontcache, you can take the following steps to fix up font appearances. I don't yet know whether this is firmly related to the other font problems I'm having...


bilbrey@garcia:~/OpenOffice/user/psprint$ rm pspfontcache
bilbrey@garcia:~/OpenOffice/user/psprint$ touch pspfontcache
bilbrey@garcia:~/OpenOffice/user/psprint$ chmod 444 pspfontcache

Now the file exists, but it cannot be overwritten by OpenOffice. Take note of where you apply this method, so that it can be undone when a bug-fix release is out.

I think the best way to proceed here is to go through both tools, one menu at a time, and compare the functions offered by each. So we'll start with the File menu in the next section.

Section 4 - Writer vs. Word: The File Menu

Here's a list of the items that both programs have in the File menu. They're in roughly the same order in both. Following that, I'll look at the differences I found.

There's much more the same then different at this level, and that's not surprising. Word offers some web-specific output features, and that's not surprising (Save as Web Page... and Web Page Preview). A brief glance at the code output from Word2K reveals a pleasant surprise after the spaghetti code HTML output by earlier versions. However, the HTML file that Word generates from this simple 17 page document is a hefty 180K. By contrast, using OpenOffice Writer to export HTML code creates a file that's just half the size, at around 90K, yet includes all the formatting that's found in both. The difference appears to by lots of IE-specific scripting generated by Word. And indeed that's the case - in IE when you float the cursor over a Comment link, it pops up a Javascript window to show the note. How cute!

The Versions interface is remarkably similar in both programs as well. One thing to note is that in OpenOffice, the versioning tool is only available when saving in the Writer native format (where such data can be saved, I'd presume that saving it in a .doc would be an invitation to crash Word, neh?) OO also has a top-level File menu entry called Reload which is used to revert to the previous saved version.

OpenOffice presents a new tool in the File menu called AutoPilot. It's the front end to a set of wizards that can be used to generate one-time or template documents for a variety of purposes, from letters and faxes to presentations. It's a wizard driven version of the extensive library of customizable templates that come with Word.

Where Word places Page Setup in the File menu, they're actually in the Formatting menu on OpenOffice. Now doesn't THAT make a little more sense, eh? Meanwhile, OpenOffice has the Printer Settings in the File menu, while Word puts them where they belong, inside the Print dialog. So we're balanced here. Finally, it is in this menu where I first learned that OpenOffice simply doesn't display options that aren't available or applicable. For instance, Save does not appear in the File menu if there aren't any changes in the document. Save As is always present, however. This "feature" of OpenOffice apparently can be configured, like Microsoft's "Personalized Menus and Toolbars". Look in Tools --> Options --> View --> Inactive menu items.

Now I'll disect the Edit menu for your perusal.

Section 5 - Writer vs. Word: The Edit Menu

List 2 shows the primary options available in the Edit Menus of our contender and that of the incumbent. Note that there are no adaptive menus as there are with Word (although they can be shut off, I know, I've done so!).

Here we're starting to see some real reorganization. There are a number of items in the OpenOffice Writer menu that flat aren't in the MS listing, or are moved from other places. Overall, I'm not displeased with the setup. When I want to edit an item, I expect to go to the edit menu. However, many of these features are not visible in the standard OO menu - I would need to be in the correct mode to see them. I could grow to dislike that. If I can't see that a feature is (or might be) available, then I don't know to look for it or how to use it. Index Entry, for instance, looks interesting. But I found it by looking at the menu configuration dialog, not at the actual Edit Menu.

Of special interest is the Navigator,shown in Figure 1 below, in two forms simultaneously.

The OpenOffice Navigator & Icon Bar

Figure 3 - The OpenOffice Navigator & Icon Bar

The Navigator provides all the same functions as the spare interface provided in Microsoft's Go To... dialog. But Navigator has two distinct views. The smaller Navigation is iconic and sequential. The Navigator proper is a fully contained dockable child window (meaning that it cannot float outside the OO parent window, but it can be docked in an edge, by moving it there with the Control key depressed). the Navigator offers the following items as markers for stepping through a document: Headings, Tables, Text Frames, Graphics, OLE Objects, Bookmarks, Sections, Hyperlinks, References, Indexes and Notes. (Notes are the OO equivalent of Comments in MS documents).

AutoText provides a variety of standard boilerplate text blocks, and the ability to create your own. I'll bypass the assorted Indexing, bibliographic and other entries for the time being, as that level of function deserved a treatment of it's own. ImageMap allows you to create hyperlinked image maps in graphics embedded within the document. The Object menu item is for editing embedded objects, most explicitly OLE Objects.

I could get lost in the functions offered from OpenOffice Writer's Edit Menu. (Okay, I did get lost, exploring, for quite a while.) Quick, now, let's move on to the View Menu, before I get sucked in again...

Section 6 - Writer vs. Word: The View Menu

Here's the blended View menus from OpenOffice Writer and Word.

There are lot's more differences here than in the previous menus. Microsoft chooses to include items that I've always regarded as Edit-type entries. Meantime, Writer offers several highlighting and quick view check-type items in its View menu.

Now I want to talk about toolbars briefly. Only briefly. OpenOffice Writer sports four toolbars. Word has 16. Count them yourself. Yes, I've seen people with over half their screen taken up with toolbars, in case they needed a function. 3 lines of text. Yeah. Ha ha ha. I'm not a fan of lots of toolbars. However, I do like customizing them, and I can do that with both programs, so I'm cool with that. You will be, too.

Fundamentally, I expect to find things about "viewing" in the view menu. By putting Header and Footer, Footnotes, and Comments in View (when the appear to belong in the Edit Menu, MS breaks my expectation. OO Writer doesn't.

Next up, the Insert menu...

Section 7 - Writer vs. Word: The Insert Menu

Following in the pattern laid in previous sections, here's the Insert menu, as seen through funky 3D glasses:

Here we're back to far more similarity than difference. This is a Good Thing (tm) from the migrating user standpoint. Differences include the insertion of Header and Footer from this menu. You edit pre-existing entities by clicking into them in the document. That makes sense to me. In the Fields and AutoText arenas, Word has many, many more possibilities than Writer does - this is primarily a function of the youth of the OO program. As the stable program continues to build a userbase, more libraries of pre-defined things (like AutoText, clipart galleries and more) should put in an appearance.

Also, because there is no single Component Object Model for the various Linux environments and applications, the only embeddable objects are other OpenOffice application items. It's not as in the Windows arena, where virtually any registered application can be embedded. Evenutally, perhaps, there will be interoperability between the Gnome, KDE and OO COM code, and then cross-embedding will work.

Overall, the Insert menu is pretty standard, fully functional, extendable in all the important ways. Now we'll proceed to the Format menu.

Section 8 - Writer vs. Word: The Format Menu

Format is another menu where I'd expect to find few differences. Is that the case? Let's see:

Indeed, there's very little real difference in the Formatting menus of the programs. The first Writer option, Default, applies the current default paragraph style to the current paragraph, removing any additional formatting or changed styles. OpenOffice also offers the Page... format option here, instead of in the File menu.

Where MS puts the Borders and Shading as well as Background items in the top level menu. OO has this functionality in each object's dialog directly. Microsoft does offer Themes... which is a selection of styles, background, borders and other effects, applied wholesale to the entire document.

The only really confusing item is Ruby, found on the OpenOffice menu. From what I can glean, it provides a form of glossing (selected text liner notes) for Asian languages. Here's the explanation from the OpenOffice roadmap from earlier this year:

1.1.6.d Ruby Text

Ruby text (explanatory text above the original text) will be able to be inserted. Ruby text is needed in most East Asian languages to add more information to written text, e.g. if a very rare Japanese word is written, Ruby is used for explanation and/or correct pronunciation. The Ruby Text window is designed as a floating window so that the user does not have to close the window to apply changes made to the text. It also works with multiple selected text and has an automatic detection feature to help the user find the right Ruby expression more easily.

Next up, the Tools menu...

Section 9 -

Here, I'd expect to see more "functionality" in the Word side of things, mostly because of the maturity of the product, not to mention a certain company's predeliction for packing in features at the expense of stability. Let's see if I'm right.

There are more differences in the Tools menu than in the others. In some cases, I think it's just that items are put at different "levels" of the menus, or in unique locations. I rather like the wordcount tool inside Tools, as MS has it, rather than subordinate to the Properties dialog. I must admit, however, that I knew just where to look, so both do make sense. Uniquely Microsoft are the Letter Wizard (I'll never miss it, Bill should have paid me for every time I had to cancel that little lovely), Online Collaboration (I think that uses NetMeeting, does it not?) as well as the Templates and Add-Ins dialog. Most of the other differences at this level are replicated functionality someplace in the other tool.

Theoretically, the next section should have a Table menu. However, only Word has a top-level table menu. All of the functions found there are part of the right-click context menu that pops up when selected inside a table from OpenOffice Writer. I'm OK with that. It might make more sense for them to add it as a top-level menu, just for competitive purposes. But again, it's not hard to puzzle out what to do, and I can get used to it quickly. So we'll just skip over that, as well as the Window and Help menus, since there's no real differences between the programs in either of those areas.

Instead, I'll just work with it for a while, and report on various impressions as I go...

Section 10 - Mucking about in OpenOffice 1.0 Writer

OK. First off, I really need to turn off auto-completion. I type "wor" and it tries to finish it as "wordbook" I don't think so. I don't use the feature in Word, I sure don't think I need to use it here. Tools-->AutoCorrect/AutoFormat... from the Word Completion tab, uncheck Complete words. Voila!

Font anti-aliasing is intermittent in OpenOffice 1.0. Something has changed since the most recent beta. There are at least three bug reports filed against it, and at least one talks about removing the global and per-user files named pspfontcache and psprint.conf to make AA work. Well, that doesn't always work as advertised. Mmmm.

Now have a look at a "normal" OpenOffice 1.0 Writer screen, as shown (thumbnailed, click to get the big picture)in Figure 4.

Working in OO Writer

Figure 4 - Working in OO Writer

Squiggley red underlines mean the same thing, and act the same way. Fundamentally, that's true across the board for OpenOffice 1.0 Writer. I can do everything that I did in Word while writing our Linux Book, only now I can work in OpenOffice, and the editors might never have known the difference. The one real hitch is Smart Quotes and it's ilk. I can live without those... can you?

Section 11 - Summary, Resources and More

Summary

In this article I compared the obvious functionality of OpenOffice 1.0 Writer against that of Microsoft Word 2000. Writer reads and writes Word files nearly perfectly (excepting Smart Quotes and other extended characters). While it doesn't use the optional embedded Visual Basic bits, it does save them back out to the target word file unchanged. The only other problem of note were font rendering challenges. It'll get fixed in a revision coming to your desktop soon.

I like OpenOffice Writer, I can do what *I* need to do in it without a problem. That means that when someone comes to me and says "Which version of Microsoft Office should I buy?" I can properly now respond with "Have you looked at OpenOffice?"

Collected resources

Winding down...

In future articles on OpenOffice, I'll look at the features of Calc, Impress, and Draw. This might even happen before 2.0 is available. Who knows?

GNU Emacs version 21.1.1 was used in the construction of this article, running on a Gentoo Linux v1.1a workstation. The raw XML was processed via PHP code written by Greg Lincoln. Take note, this whole place works only because Greg knows his stuff. I just slap makeup on, poke holes in things, and distract him at crucial moments.

This article is Copyright 2002 by Brian P. Bilbrey. All rights reserved. Brian is a soon-to-be-Maryland-based geek, an author, administrator, technical writer, product designer and husband. He enjoys reading, fishing and hiking, but is usually found behind a keyboard or three instead. It's not his fault, he watched too much British comedy on television during those all-important formative years.

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