Hi, I was reading Haiku’s FAQ and noticed there aren’t any office suites for haiku. So I was wondering if there was a port of libreoffice(not likely) or some kind of word processor for haiku, preferably it should support MS’s .doc format. Or, at least, if there’s any plans to write(or port) one.
Help appreciated!
There was a commercial office package by Beatware called BeBasics, which consisted of a spreadsheet app (Sum It) and a word processor (Writer). The Sum-It was open sourced and is available on Haiku Depot. The word processor was not open sourced,and doesn’t work on Haiku anyway. I have a copy, but I am not certain as to its legal status for distribution. Would anybody like to comment?
The other alternative is GoBe Productive, which is still available for download,and apparently does work in Haiku.
There are another app: LittleWriter. It generates html files, and can export as PDF also.
You can get it from here:
http://clasquin-johnson.co.za/michel/haiku/qt4-apps/qt4-productivity-apps/qt4-word-processors/littlewriter-2.html
Sorry, I didn’t notice that style edit could handle rtf files. With rtf I can edit text in haiku and still be able to send it to someone using MS Word, great stuff…
Be aware that StyledEdit is using the RTF-Translator to open rtf files. It only saves in styled text, i.e. plain text to other applications. You can use the command-line command “translate file.txt file.rtf 'RTF '”, but that doesn’t seem to convert the formatting (which defies the purpose really… :)).
Regards,
Humdinger
The RTF translator has some support for exporting styled text now (one of the tasks acomplished during Google Code-In), but apparently we lack any tool which could make use of the feature. StyledEdit probably needs an “export” menu.
That being said, ThinkFree Office is probably the best choice currently for a rather complete office suite.
TFO is a Java app. All my Java apps have stopped working recently after some changes to OpenJDK. Yes, it is something that will no doubt be resolved. But right now it shows that we still need a native solution.
can you explain??
qt5.5 has been released for haiku, kde frameworks 5 is a set of qt libraries with minimal dependencies outside of qt, the calligra office suite is office software by kde running on its libraries, so it should work. maybe. idk.
“…I was wondering if there was a port of libreoffice(not likely) or some kind of word processor for haiku…”
The question was pretty general in nature. I didn’t see any remark that indicated that he was looking for only non-commercial free open source, but simply "Is there a word processor available?"
BeatWare Writer and GoBe are what is available.
True, there are no good solutions for office working at the moment. Until people write new apps, we only have 15 year old BeOS apps to work with.
Wow it is not anymore commercial and closed source? Or is it the trial version without saving support?
And GobeProductive is very old, it does not support current office documents like MS Office past Word 98.
There is no really good solutions for office working in Haiku at the moment. And there are not enough developers to build a team to port OpenOffice to Haiku.
True, there are no good solutions for office working at the moment. Until people write new apps, we only have 15 year old BeOS apps to work with.
Just to be clear here, do the 15 year old BeOS apps refer just to word processing or apps in general? I’m asking because i thought people were developing Haiku apps right now (e.g. bbjimmy on this forum, and no doubt others).
But in any event, i do think more people will write Haiku apps as it becomes more developer friendly.
After all, there are at least three strong points for coding apps for Haiku that are entirely separate from its technical innovations (some of which are still novel or not in much use elsewhere, such as all the metadata in the filesystem). For one thing, the API is extremely stable — at least those same 15 years of stability. And further it is well described in several books. And it has a well thought out object system including an objects for the app, for windows, for events, etc that are integrated with the OS.
As far as i know, there are no other systems in the free world that have all of these three things going for them, and some have none of them.
So i think the system is very attractive for devs, and these applications, including new word processors, will be forthcoming ---- as soon as the system is sufficiently dev friendly.
Now, different devs will have different thresholds of comfort, but as the system accommodates more and more basic dev needs, more and more devs will migrate to it.
And being dev friendly is a subset of being user friendly, as a dev can get by on less (for one thing, if a dev needs a tool, he can at least potentially just code it up). So i don’t think this is a chicken and egg problem where you would hypothetically need a very good system to attract people to develop on it, but you could only get such a system with enough devs ---- rather i think it’s a positive feedback loop, where as soon as it gets good enough to be useable by enough devs, it will then steadily get better because of more apps being available for it.
For me personally, it’s not quite comfortable enough to use yet: i would want to be able to install it on a gpt-partitioned drive, have remote command line access to it while somebody else in my family was using it, and be able to easily run a non-gui emacs on it (the mac, btw, has a non-gui emacs pre-installed, fwiw), and probably would want some enforced permissions on what user can access what files. Others would require less, some would require more, and yet others might require some slightly different minimal set of capabilities and tools.
But if it were comfortable enough to use — not as luxurious as a mac, just partially as dev-comfortable as a linux box — then the prospects of writing apps on a well-thought-out system would be very enticing.
All of this just imvho, of course.
[quote=california_dan]
For me personally, it’s not quite comfortable enough to use yet: i would want to be able to install it on a gpt-partitioned drive, have remote command line access to it while somebody else in my family was using it, and be able to easily run a non-gui emacs on it (the mac, btw, has a non-gui emacs pre-installed, fwiw), and probably would want some enforced permissions on what user can access what files. Others would require less, some would require more, and yet others might require some slightly different minimal set of capabilities and tools.But if it were comfortable enough to use — not as luxurious as a mac, just partially as dev-comfortable as a linux box — then the prospects of writing apps on a well-thought-out system would be very enticing.
All of this just imvho, of course.[/quote]
Nice post
Just so you know:
you can ssh into a haiku box (but not as a different user)
I think there is an emacs port somewhere? I know I’ve heard it mentioned. There is definitely qemacs (I use vim so not sure)
Thanks @Munchausen for the updated info.
So it sounds like Haiku is closer than i thought.
qemacs is actually a probably a good choice for bootstrapping a new system since it is probably much easier to build and presumably requires next-to-no maintenance. It’s not as extensive as emacs, but lets you edit files and run one shell as an inferior, so enough to get by.
The gpt thing is important to me for multi-booting with grub.
Although i certainly don’t switch systems every day, it is useful to keep several around so that you can switch back and forth if trouble does arise for whatever reason. And it also makes it easy to add a new system. Because today’s disks are so huge you can easily leave most of the disk unpartitioned, and just slice off another few gigabytes for a new system in a new partition when one comes around you want to try. (And you can also keep all your home accounts on one partition. It would be unreasonable to ask Haiku to share a directory for home partitions with other systems, because that probably has to be formatted BFS in order to take advantage of the expanded file attributes, i guess? But it would be nice if the BFS partitions you create for it could be nestled together with all your other partitions.)
So i’m glad Haiku is getting so close, and i guess i’ll just have to stay tuned.
Hope you’re running it productively, and if you like programming, hope you’re getting to code up some apps in areas you find interesting.
A bit more info 
GPT is supposedly working. I haven’t tried it myself and I’m not sure exactly how stable it is but Jessicah has been doing a lot of work on it (and EFI). It was mentioned some time ago in a weekly update: Haiku monthly activity report - 06/2015 | Haiku Project
[quote]
Hope you’re running it productively, and if you like programming, hope you’re getting to code up some apps in areas you find interesting.[/quote]
Myself, I am on and off with haiku. I keep attempting to use it for work and as a general OS, normally this starts with a push to port a few things that I need for work (which is programming as you guessed). Generally after a week or month or so I stumble either because of new bugs in the nightlies, needing a better web browser, or needing some piece of software that I don’t have time to port myself. Hardware support can be an issue, so I chose my last laptop (thinkpad x230) with haiku support in mind. I recently got a P50 and I’m not expecting great support in haiku but I haven’t tried it yet. It really is getting to the point where it is almost usable full time though, I’d encourage you to give it a go at some point 
This is kind of an old post, so I don’t know if twk_amz is still around. There are a couple other alternatives that I didn’t see mentioned in the thread:
Good day!
To introduce myself, I’m fairly new to Haiku. I’ve used Linux for a long time and I’ve been closely watching on Haiku since Alpha2 or so, and I was very intrigued. It wasn’t until some time ago that I decided to give it a go and install a latest nightly on my machine alongside with WinXP (thus letting go of Linux).
Three things disappointed me. 1) Sound doesn’t work for me - but I’m not sure what the exact problem is, codecs or drivers - I didn’t take time to figure it out yet. 2) Broadcom Wi-fi which doesn’t work for me, and I can’t access net from Haiku now, which is a pain (I’ll work around that soon) and 3) and most important: no office suit.
I mean, Haiku is trying to build a solid, fast, well-thought, desktop-oriented OS. Office suite is one of the most important piece of software an OS needs to have available. And HaikuOS still relies on either extremely outdated or Java-based or proprietary office. Neither of those are good ideas. The only good idea is to have a native and functional office suite, which is not around.
I’m not a good programmer myself, just an amateur. I’d like to learn Haiku programming, but more importantly, I find it very unfair that there’s no viable word\spreadsheet processing solution for Haiku.
I want to ask this: would it be a good idea if I started a voluntary-based project to build a native office suite for Haiku from scratch? I might not be a good coder (though I’d give it a go), but I have ideas.
I see it this way:
A Haiku Office (whatever we’ll call it) must be based on principles of simplicity, lightweightness, be functional enough yet not bloat. It must focus on editing and viewing the OpenDocument files first, when this is reached - then would be time to give docx\rtf a go.
I just really think it’d be a good idea to start something, to slowly involve people into development of this, rather than talking this around and suggesting non-native or outdated alternatives.
Thanks for your attention.
There where serveral discussions about this:
https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/gobe_productive_haiku_0?page=1
We already startet collecting some ideas, where you are free to join in and edit this document online:
The challenge is: Such a project is huge, i mean really huge, also it doesen look like:
Just some infos
Libreoffice
…has had 434,146 commits made by 1,526 contributors
representing 7,175,116 lines of code
Abiword (wich was ported to BeOS some years ago…)
…has had 20,074 commits made by 91 contributors
representing 760,105 lines of code
Calligra
…has had 99,694 commits made by 599 contributors
representing 3,056,938 lines of code