compatibility of LibreOffice with OpenOffice
 

Has anyone tested the compatibility of LibreOffice with OpenOffice by reworking (using LibreOffice) a complicated document originally written in OpenOffice? Are there any problems switching from one to the other while working on a given project?

They seem compatible currently.

My templates, which are extensively customized, work equally well in both. I have moved documents back and forth, but nothing I would call exceptionally complex.

As LO undergoes development, this would likely be subject to change.

libreoffice forked recently from openoffice, so, today, they have a big base in common. As the time goes by, the code base will diverge and the compatibility problems will probably arise, and grow.

There shouldn't be any problems. The Open Document Format is an international standard, so any odt or ods document should be the same, whether it comes from Openoffice, Libreoffice, or Abiword. If it isn't, that's not a fork – it's a bug! I haven't noticed any problems with documents, templates, or spell-checking (but that's Hunspell for both).

That depends on what we are talking about. HTML is also an standard and you won't find two browsers that render it the same, even if they both use the same rendering engine (gecko/xulrunner, khtml, webkit or whatever else there's around nowadays). But we don't even need to go that far, just create a msoffice doc and open it in two computers to see what I mean. Or in the same computer using two versions of msoffice. It will always look different.

There ARE differences in how libreoffice and openoffice render the docs right now, you don't need to wait for the future to come. But they are probably not that significant to affect most users for now. But the differences will grow with the time, probably.

That's not a valid comparison. Like SGML, from which it is derived, HTML is intended to distinguish types of content. Some tags may be specific, such as font specification, but most cannot be because they cannot control the size and resolution of the display.
That's interesting: can you give an example?

Thank you
 

Thanks to everyone for their input; have been working on same book project for years and was concerned that this switch-over could cause significant problems, but your info suggests that there shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't try any new fancy changes or inputs. Hope to have the last final touches in place soon, so future diversions between the two shouldn't be a problem. Once again, thanks for taking the time to reply.

You only need to look at the libreoffice and openoffice changelogs. Anything concerning something more complex than localization, artwork or documentation that's not been backported to OO will mean a difference and that can only grow unless both suites decide to merge again at some point, which is unlikely. I read mailing lists now and then, but office suites is certainly not my main field of interest (if at all).

Yes there is definitely a difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice, at least in Writer. I had made brochures in OpenOffice 3.0 and when I needed to print some more I had already moved to LibreOffice 3.4.2. The borders were all screwed up and the position of the text was all over the place. I had assumed that the file had become corrupted but when I pulled up a backup copy it too was whacked. I pulled it into a different PC, which I never use, but still had OpenOffice 3.0 on it, and they pulled up perfect. So now I know it was not the files. I installed the latest version of OpenOffice 3.3 and it too looked perfect. So yes, they are not the same and it was too much work to fix all 8 brochures so I have reverted back to OpenOffice.

agree with Rorschwihr
 

Thank you Rorschwihr for your experience; like the independent spirit of Libre, but as use Writer a lot, can't risk the switch, so downloading OO.0 [and extensions] to my new openSUSE releases.They should make better effort to keep all mainstream functions identical.