(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

greengeek, re your AbiWord/FreeOffice incompatibility, I found something similar in the past which was corrected by changing the selected font colour in AbiWord, to see what was written in TextMaker (usual doc format). Try that, see if it works for you?
[EDIT: or it might be that AbiWord is interpreting the background to be set as "black", rather than the usual page colour - so try changing text background. It's tedious, and what I found more irritating was that font type and size was not always retained between AbiWord and TextMaker. If I was able to ensure that the font libraries accessed by both applications were the same, perhaps there would be greater consistency]]

greengeek wrote:

vicmz wrote:Only thing is I have to look for the textmaker icon among all files in the freeoffice directory,

On my HDD install, the icons are at /usr/share/freeoffice/icons.

Sorry, I mean the launchers, the files that launch the programs

I just loaded Freeoffice into a live CD session of Puppy 412 Lite and Textmaker worked beautifully, even exporting as pdf. Didn't try Planmaker etc as I'm not likely to use that much.

Greengeek,

If you intend to buy a commercial version, go for 2012, as I got the full 2010 version & like Puppyt found unpredictable file incompatibilities when trying to import. Fonts weren't great either. Libreoffice is just better.

I can rely on libreoffice being available for Puppy, so tend to use that. The WP in freeoffice is better than abiword. All the programs seem obvious, intuitive, streamlined - just like Puppy. I have no idea why Freeoffice is barely known. It is fairly priced, well written and deserves more recognition.

Having tried it for a few hours I am very impressed by its speed and comprehensive capability, their forum seems vibrant, and they offer a free font every month.
I am never going to use any office app to its full potential, only for average use, so others may find issues, but it does exactly what I want from an office app, and more.

Terryphi wrote:Does Planmaker open spreadsheets in the Libreoffice/OpenOffice format?
Features section on website makes no mention of this.

No, Planmaker does not open spreadsheets in LibreOffice/OpenOffice .ods format so thumbs down from me.

Just for fun I took my portable FreeOffice and stripped it down to just US English.(No help files) Made a 20MB .tar.gz

Then I stripped out everything except TextMaker 9.3MB

Cheers, J

Puppyt wrote:it might be that AbiWord is interpreting the background to be set as "black", rather than the usual page colour - so try changing text background.

Thanks puppyt. It seems that once I open the Textmaker .rtf document in Abiword I need to select all, then go to Format, Font, Highlight color,and tick "No highlight color" then I can see everything as normal. Maybe it is a compatibility error in understanding the "no highlight color" field, rather than a misunderstanding of which actual color has been selected. Not even sure if Freeoffice understands the "no highlight color" field - I will have to have a tinker.

ozsouth wrote:Libreoffice is just better.

I feel that Libreoffice is really slow compared to S.O/Freeoffice (on my hardware anyway) and I've had a lot of incompatibility issues between Abiword and Libreoffice aswell, so I thought I'd give Freeoffice a real good thrash and see if it's worth sticking with.

Wary5392 frugal
softmaker-freeoffice-676.tgz
I have also installed freeoffice on Windows 7.

Impressive!
Both PlanMaker and TextMaker seem to work very well, and fast.
PlanMaker will NOT open ods or gnumeric files.
TextMaker will open odt files.

An address list saved in various formats:

Gnumeric (my preferred spreadsheet) - address.gnumeric - 32k
Saved in ods format from Gnumeric - address.ods - 80k
Saved in xls format from Gnumeric - address.xls - 288k

Open the address.xls in PlanMaker, then:
Saved in tmd format from PlanMaker - address.tmd - 365k

My preferred spreadsheet is Gnumeric:
+ also cross platform (installed on Wary and Win7)
+ regular expression search and replace
+ simple interface
+ smaller output files
+ speed, very fast
+ will convert to almost any file format
+ will open almost any file format

Bill

I've been using word pocessing professionally for writing and publishing for over 25 years.

First I used WordPerfect 5 dos then windows. Then I moved completely to Puppy around 2006. Tried Abiword - inferior then and apparently still is. Used WordPerfect with Win 2000 Virtualbox for a time awkwordly. Got used to OpenOffice Write, finally painfully abandoning WorfPerfect. Then came LibreOffice, which is where I am probably for the duration. Currently v. 3.64.

LibreOffice is large, but it's in /mnt/home in my frugal PreciseNop and I still have small bulletproof save files. Updating is easy. I also moved the .config file to /mnt/home so (with spell dictionary, etc.) that remains current for whatever save file I use. (Same approach with Opera). After the first run LibreOffice is FAST.

Of course I was interested in and tried FreeOffice. Yes, it's relatvely small but limited compared to LibreOffice. And I hate the introduction of another set of file types. LibreOffice and FreeOffice play awkwardly together (in my experience, but who would want both?). LibreOffice is open and maintained.

If I were a developer, I'd fork LibreOffice Writer into a single program separate from the other components in the office suite and make it independent from Java. It'd become a smaller word processor with more stability and functions than Abiword.

smokey01 wrote:

vicmz wrote:

smokey01 wrote:I didn't notice a 64 bit version.

Is one available?

Yes, there is. After registration I received an email message with my serial number and download links including 32bit and 64bit, .rpm and .deb packages.

Thanks I must have missed that.

Another download coming up.

Well I downloaded the 64bit deb version and guess what, all the binaries are 32bit and wouldn't run on Fatdog. I tried it in Dpup Exprimo, it worked but the menu entry graphics are pretty crappy. It may be smaller than LibreOffice but it won't take it's place here.

vicmz wrote:If I were a developer, I'd ......make it independent from Java. It'd become a smaller word processor with more stability and functions than Abiword.

Yes, good point. That's the other reason I gave up on Libreoffice - kept getting java errors and didn't see any reason for the Java, given that I wasn't using database functions. I don't feel that Java is safe, so why have it unless you absolutely need it?

Henry's earlier comment had me reminiscing about WP5.1/DOS. Curse the loss of the "Reveal Codes" function, with subsequent word processors following the style-over-substance format route of MS Office. I regret not having looked at SMO's Function Key allocation more closely - just found a wealth of features - such as options to hide the toolbars to have SMO look pretty similar to the popular FocusWriter, it appears to me. There are plenty of options to modify the F-keys with Atl/Shift/Ctrl combos with personalised keyboard mapping shortcuts, so I guess I could emulate my ol' WordPerfect, to a degree (e.g., http://studymore.org.uk/wp51.htm).
Smokey01 has a good point - the menu dialogue text and icons are a bit grainy, and I haven't found how to customise that to my liking. SMO2008 I think had a good dialog font like Arial or Sans Serif, but since SMO2010 have opted for a dot-matrix type of font, for unknown reasons. Hasn't been a show-stopper for me, though I would like to see an option to change this. Perhaps via GTK theme preferences ("Linux (system)" under Tools>Options>Appearance>Dialog style), if SMO can find Puppy's GTK libraries automatically? Am I just dreaming?
Hmmm I think TextMaker2008 also had a "open at last working point" feature that was very useful for working intermittently on large documents. Nowadays when you resume to work on such a document, you open at the start of page1. I think that SoftMaker are working to restore this in SMO2012+, but if it could be default (or selectable) in Puppy FreeOffice, it would be a big plus I think.

I turn Java off in Libreoffice options, & apart from the odd error message, no problems. Much better without Java & fast after the first run in a session (is cached).

Puppyt brings up an excellent point about TM's ability to open the document at the place where you last typed. I can't recall that being available on any SM desktop--I've only seen it on TM on my Android phone and Windows Mobile.

Softmaker on WinMo is absolutely first-rate, a desktop replica, while TM on Android doesn't impress me much; in fact, I use QuickOffice, which is also limited but has better zoom and other things.

My problem with Softmaker on Linux is that it is resource-hungry--you get a significant bump in cpu use and temperature rise.

Even running puppy 4.32 on an aging Vaio Picturebook with 114mb RAM, Wine/MS Word 97 runs at a lower cost than an SM 2008 sfs.

I find the same SM resource issue in Lubuntu 12.04, and on Lubuntu as well, I run MS Word 97, still the best word processor IMHO with regard to ability vs resource.

When a user can run Wine, then a program within Wine, and still get better cpu/temp response than a straight-up Linux program, well, I'm not a developer, but something's up.

Jake

@L18L - how did you get the jwm menu to display a tooltip like this:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 279#671279
I didn't see any documentation on it... or is it a different wm?

The lack of menu icons makes me suspect it is openbox provided by this pet:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_pa ... nglish.pet

I have it too, but it's LXPanel (+ROX/Compiz), not JWM...

Greetings!