Having become acquainted with BeOS 5.03 Pro in recent weeks, I have encountered a dearth of word processing applications. StyledEdit will work for basic tasks but does not support a lot of needed features. I recently downloaded AbiWord from BeBits, but much of it is broken (i.e. changing text color will crash the program)
What would be really sweet would be to see a port of OpenOffice for Haiku, either packaged with the released distro or released in close proximity to the time of Haiku’s release.
OpenOffice has certain propriety productivity software vendors who shall remain unspecified frightened; it would be very approrpriate for there to be a port of this app for the Haiku platform. :lol:
Beunited.org has a team for porting OpenOffice to BeOS, but I’ve read somewhere, they’re waiting for the availability of Java on BeOS, because OpenOffice has some Java parts.
Also check out Gobe Productive. You can buy it from purplus.com - it is a nice, very simple integrated office suite, that sits neatly between StyledEdit and the large OpenOffice/MSOffice type of package.
It’s actually a really nice program, and perfectly good enough for most tasks.
I'm using a trial version of Gobe Productive 3 on WinXP.
If there’s ever a chance that they port that back to BeOS, there’s no need of OpenOffice. I believe that the BeOS version is version 2?
Yes.
I think most of the shift in version number was the port to windows, don’t think there’s all that much new in version 3. It would be nice to have some updated MS-Office format translators though.
At least Gobe have heard of BeOS. If we can demonstrate there is a decent market on Haiku in future, they may well port 3 back to BeOS. In fact Tom Hoke, one of the guys who set up Gobe, was maintaining 3.0 for BeOS, so there is some code around (screenshots are around). He was just doing it as a hobby, it was not release quality, but it still means Gobe have a smaller barrier to get back into the BeOS/Haiku market than most.
OO.o is virtually unportable to a new arch - the Mac guys have enough trouble keeping it running under X11… and they have Java and full POSIX
OO.o 2.0 might be easier - it uses native GUI widgets in a lot of places, but it relies ever more on Java - its entire database engine is written in Java, for instance.
It is, according to comments I’ve seen, the largest opensource programme in existance - its almost all one binary at that - soffice.bin
Its theorethically possible that it could be ‘encouraged’ to work on BeOS but you’d need to be treaded the edge of illegality - BONE and pjava would be required.
Also check out Gobe Productive. You can buy it from purplus.com - it is a nice, very simple integrated office suite, that sits neatly between StyledEdit and the large OpenOffice/MSOffice type of package.
I have a trial version of Gobe Productive 2. I haven’t used it enough yet to really make an opinion on it- my trial version doesn’t let me save files, so I can’t evaluate how well it converts files to other formats, how well other word processors can handle opening GP generated files in their native format, etc.
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It would be nice to have some updated MS-Office format translators though.
And a translator to handle .sxw (Open Office Writer) files too
I have a trial version of Gobe Productive 2. I haven't used it enough yet to really make an opinion on it- my trial version doesn't let me save files, so I can't evaluate how well it converts files to other formats, how well other word processors can handle opening GP generated files in their native format, etc.
It’s fine both ways for .doc, unless you care about footnotes, graphics, or macros.
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And a translator to handle .sxw (Open Office Writer) files too :wink:
Yes, that would be cool…probably would be a reasonable undertaking, since it’s just a zipful of xml…
