In this modern age of .md and similar files why not try for "blue water sailing" and instead create an office suite which specifically plays to only open standards?
A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.
That said, I'd really like to see an office suite put together out of the various opensource tools which try to approach documents/graphics in new and striking ways:
- LyX --- a "What You See Is What You Mean" document processor, it can offer quite professional capabilities (when I was doing STEM composition, the book which came in as LaTeX exported from LyX was the cleanest and most straight-forward manuscript I ever worked on)
- PySpread --- (or maybe Flexisheet if someone can get it to a usable state) Way more than most folks need, this Pythonic spreadsheet where every cell can be either a Python program or the output of a Python program could revolutionize what folks do w/ spreadsheets and data
- Jupyter Notebooks --- almost a de facto standard, getting wider adoption would be a good thing
- ipe --- https://ipe.otfried.org/ --- this, or TikzEdit or maybe xasy for Asymptote would be more drawing tool than most users would ever want, and able to make anything anyone really needs
> A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.
This kind of thinking in tech is why Office doesn't have any serious competitors. It's insufficient for what most business users need, and they're the reason the whole world runs on Office.
I remember how promising AbiWord (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbiWord) and GNUmeric (http://www.gnumeric.org/) were 20 years ago when I first started using Linux and FreeBSD. Back in 2004, OpenOffice was slow on my hand-me-down PC running a 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor and with only 64MB RAM, but AbiWord ran well; it was a nice, lightweight word processor that was decently compatible with Microsoft Word for my needs as a high school student who needed to turn in essays and other reports. I've never tried GNUmeric, but I remember people singing its praises back in 2004.
I haven't heard anything about AbiWord and GNUmeric in recent years, though. I haven't kept up with them since my college days.
Different apps render Markdown differently. The syntax may be standardized (though extended in different ways), but the layout will be wildly different if you open the same document in several different apps. This doesn’t resolve the author’s stated issue of not having a true wysiwyg document when shared with a third party.
.md is a terrible format for serious work. It only supports a few opinionated types of formatting. This is reasonable when you want to directly write one (the intended use of the format). For interchange you want at least RTF or XHTML.
> With a free price tag, it could easily do that. But, it first needs to provide the required functionality, and today, it stubbornly refused to that, for ideological reasons.
Very confused by the article, even after re-reading it. The author keeps bringing up ideology throughout the article, but is there any arguments or evidence given that this is a factor? The simplest explanation to me is that OOXML is a de-facto proprietary format, and implementing full compatibility with it is simply a large technical undertaking that LibreOffice doesn't have the resources to effectively achieve right now. They even hint at that themselves: "From what I've been able to decipher, no non-Microsoft Office program implements the full specification and follows it to the letter."
I agree with you. I disagree with the assertion from the author that LibreOffice refuses to implement the OOXML standard for ideological reasons; nothing was cited in the article supporting this assertion. If it were true that LibreOffice's developers only want to support open standards, then there wouldn't have been support for the pre-Office 2007 binary formats.
Yes, I believe that imperfect compatibility with Microsoft Office is holding LibreOffice back, but perfect compatibility isn't going to happen without massive resources. It's immense work being 100% compatible with a proprietary, under-documented standard. Without an army of developers, it's going to take a very long time. Think of how long it took Wine and ReactOS to get to today's usability, and those projects still have much work to do. Think of how long it took the HaikuOS people to release release-candidate issues of their project.
The big point that the article is trying to make is bookended by these quotes: "... there's a standard, things ought to be simple. So you could, theoretically and perhaps even practically, use non-Microsoft software to get the job done!". "... it[LibreOffice] stubbornly refused to that, for ideological reasons."
This feels at odds with my experience of the LibreOffice community and maintainers in general, and also appears to misunderstand the detail of the OOXML standard. I think the blockers to full pixel-level replication of Office documents have more to do with the sheer complexity of the formats involved and the obscure way some of the features are described, which AFAIK often involves just saying "do this the way Word does it" instead of describing the behaviour in a completely implementation agnostic way. As a Mac user, I am very familiar with the minor differences in rendering between Mac and Windows version of Office 365. Most people will know there are differences in rendering between the web versions and the desktop versions, too. And these implementations were written by the same organisation with people who presumably had access not only to the specification but also the actual source code and libraries that were used for the "primary" Windows implementation.
For me to agree with this article's premise, I'd need to see an example of even one implementation of OOXML support that meets the author's standards.
If people want to use it then they can use it. If they don't want to then leave them alone. This is what's great about FLOSS. You use what you want to.
A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.
That said, I'd really like to see an office suite put together out of the various opensource tools which try to approach documents/graphics in new and striking ways:
- LyX --- a "What You See Is What You Mean" document processor, it can offer quite professional capabilities (when I was doing STEM composition, the book which came in as LaTeX exported from LyX was the cleanest and most straight-forward manuscript I ever worked on)
- PySpread --- (or maybe Flexisheet if someone can get it to a usable state) Way more than most folks need, this Pythonic spreadsheet where every cell can be either a Python program or the output of a Python program could revolutionize what folks do w/ spreadsheets and data
- Jupyter Notebooks --- almost a de facto standard, getting wider adoption would be a good thing
- ipe --- https://ipe.otfried.org/ --- this, or TikzEdit or maybe xasy for Asymptote would be more drawing tool than most users would ever want, and able to make anything anyone really needs
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