7.2 Word processing
7.2.1 OpenOffice.org / StarOffice Suite
7.2.2 abiword
7.2.3 kword
7.2.4 lyx and latex
7.2.5 WordNet (dictionary / thesaurus /synonym /
antonym finder)
7.2.1 OpenOffice.org / StarOffice Suite
OpenOffice is a complete office suite: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, drawing program, graphing module, and editor for mathematical equations. It sports the best, and the most feature-packed word processor and spreadsheet for Linux. Highly recommended. OpenOffice is included on the more recent Linux distribution CDs (Nov.2002). The latest version can be downloaded (free) from http://www.openoffice.org/ (large, ~70 MB download, probably not practical with a modem). The current (non-developer) version of OpenOffice is 1.0.1 (Oct. 2002). OpenOffice is cross-platform: it runs on Linux, MS Windows, Solaris, and Mac OS X, with full file-level compatibility.
Brief history. StarOffice used to be a commercial program ("Star Division", Germany). It was purchased by Sun Microsystems and the source code donated to the open source community under General Public Licence (Aug.2000). It is being rapidly developed by programmers many of whom are still associated with / paid by Sun. The open-source version is called "OpenOffice.org". Sun occasionally releases its own product based on a recent stable built of OpenOffice and calls it "StarOffice". Thus "OpenOffice.org" and "StarOffice" are basically the same products, with some (minor) feature additions in StarOffice. OpenOffice is officially called OpenOffice.org because of some trademark issues.
Description. OpenOffice looks and acts very much like MS Office for Windows. This includes richness of features, large size (requires considerable amount of disk space, memory, and processor speed), and well-buried features (may require some careful mouse-clicking to access some items). OpenOffice may not be worth your trouble without at least 64 MB of physical memory; the more memory the better. Open Office is very stable, although it sometimes displays weird artifacts ("ghosts") on my screen. It has a good file-level compatibility with MS Office: read and write MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint file formats. Natively, it uses a ground-breaking xml open file format: the text and pictures are zipped together into one file. When I unzip the file (unzip my_file.sxv), I can extract the original pictures--something MS Office cannot possibly do (with sometimes serious consequences for document management).
OpenOffice does not look as "sexy" as some other Linux office alternatives. Yet, it is a real productivity workhorse and its polish is rapidly improving. In brief, we highly recommend StarOffice/OpenOffice to cover even demanding office needs. Feature-for-feature, it matches almost anything found in MS Word (although has more trouble matching MS Excel) and adds some extras (long missing in MS Office).
Best of all, OpenOffice sports an open and beautifully designed file format which is rapidly becoming a standard (only unimaginative or corrupt decisions makers would insist on storing their data in a file format that can be read exclusively by a product of one company). This file format is suitable for serious uses because it can be parsed with third-party tools.
Installation. The installation of OpenOffice/StarOffice can be confusing. It goes like this:
Make sure you have enough hard drive space. To check the space use the df (="disk free") command:
df -h
This displays a report on the used and available hard drive space in a human-legible form (option -h). At minimum, you need some 350 MB of free disk space (of which, ~100 MB you can release after installation).
Decompress the downloaded file. I did it as root in the /usr/local directory for "local server" installation, but you may also choose /home/your_login for "personal"
* License
