LibreOffice in Slackware.
 

How about a thread to discuss using LibreOffice in Slackware?
Problems?
Successes?
Tips?

LibreOffice-6.2 was released this morning, Thursday, 7 February 2019.
It will be the last series to also be offered in 32-bit.

The annoucement, https://blog.documentfoundation.org/...breoffice-6-2/

The Release Notes, https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.2

AlienBob's LibreOffice packages, http://slackware.uk/people/alien/sla...eoffice/pkg64/

A recent thread that reached a successful conclusion,
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...hi-4175647308/

Well, that sucks. I use LO on my netbook, even though it still runs 5.4.

Just to clarify though:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/...otes/6.2#Linux

Presumably this means that Eric could still make 32 bit binaries beyond 6.2 if he wanted?

EDIT: either way, it's not a major issue, I imagine. The version of Abiword I use is 2.8 from 2010.

As build versions, x86 compatibility will still be maintained in the sources:
(from the 6.2 Realease Notes).
So it will still be possible to build 32-bits packages for Slackware (etc.).

Which means that you will still be able to find 32bit LibreOffice packages in my repository.

Both Alienbob's package and self compiled from website works well.

I run current so some time a while ago Alienbob's package wouldnt work cause of some library version mismatch or such (prolly installed packages in system vs current alien repo versions mismatch) and so I built it from their .tar.gz in /opt or something. TBH cant remember if it was libreoffice or openoffice (shame on me?).

But atm I have Alienbob's package and it has been working great.

I have seen some glitches in an Excel spreadsheet template but I think that it was because the spreadsheet template was old and not properly redone (an old logo that wasnt there on windows/office was there, but if you saved the document, close and then reopened the document it wasnt there). But this is for .docx format ._.''

Problems:
PDF support - meaning advanced editing and even rendering PDFs has always been bumpy for me.
It's not the fastest software out there.
Can be buggy, especially if you get into some less used features. I've had trouble with plugins for example.
There are some layout oddities when sharing docs with others.
No fault of Libre, but most people use Microsoft, and if they have the slightest issue with a Libre open source file, they lose their minds.

Successes:
Until I started using Alien Bob's builds, I found building the wretched thing to be tedious. Now I upgrade with two files, main install + one dictionary. Many thanks for that.
Works better than MS in some ways, and maintains a tidy, coherent design.

Tips:
I use it for local editing, then upload to Google Docs for sharing with colleagues.

I have been using LibreOffice for years now in a windows environment. (Anything else than LibreOffice did not really work for me in the beginning, and I have not been checking recent improvements in for example Abiword/Calligra etc.).

For example we use MSexcel spreadsheets with shared info. Mostly no problems but I have to make sure NOT to copy/paste sections with merged cells or any formatting (i.e. transfer the stuff over via Shift-paste into the shared MSexcel-document) to prevent any weird error messages when a windows-user opens the file next time around.

Also I routinely edit Word documents coming from Windows or Mac users and that works fine (especially via Track Changes) albeit for some font-issues (I think inserting the 'special character' in LibreOffice works fine, but when the other end has used 'Symbol' for this purpose, this gets lost in translation). Fonts are one of the problem-sources in editing shared files...

When texts contain references made with something as EndNote this should have been turned into flat text before working on it in LibreOffice otherwise any editing ruins the bibliography. Like also mentioned here. I normally save a new copy with only my changes and keep the original intact; then they can always merge via comparing the files side by side.

But in general very happy with LibreOffice (vs MS Office), Inkscape (vs AI) and The Gimp (vs Photoshop)

I download the rpm binary package and use rpm2tgz to convert it to a slackware package. Works well.

Many thanks for your LibreOffice package, Eric. :)

Writer and Calc work fine, but I never was that impressed with Impress. I currently run PowerPoint with Wine because I need to collaborate on slides with others, and I just don't think it would go that smoothly. On the other hand, the formatting for these slides is very simple, so maybe I should do some more experimenting.

I use MS Office 2010 in WINE daily. I used to be a HUGE supporter of OpenOffice/Libreoffice but I have always found it to be very clunky. It's kind of crazy that Office under WINE generally runs oodles faster than a supposedly NATIVE Linux app.

Anyway, I always keep a Libreoffice install on hand, because many of my precedents are in opendocument format, but I find myself using it less and less. AlienBob's packages have always worked best for me so I highly recommend them.

ok... there's also WPS Office for those who are looking for an alternative:
http://wps-community.org/
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...ce/wps-office/

OpenOffice has been my everyday Office suite for over 15 years on Windows and over 10 years on Linux. I tried LibreOffice when it was forked off OO but never found any advantages. When upgrading OOo I simply download the rpm binaries and convert them with rpm2tgz.

All of us who regularly share documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, or move them between Linux and Windows, know that seamless transfer between OSs or office suits simply does not exist. The major culprit is Microsoft's xml format. A plain document seldom causes problems, but even a minimum of formatting - indents, headers, footnotes - might give trouble.

Sticking to the old .doc, .xml, and .ppt formats is one solution but doesn't help when someone sends you a .docx file to work with.

Softmaker handles MS xml files pretty well, but its GUI and menus differ a lot from other office suits so there's a learning curve. There are a few small snags in its Linux version, and I've had issues with pptx files created in Softmaker Linux when opening them in MSOffice.

I sometimes use WPS Office for converting .doc <> .docx and .ppt <> .pptx. A small snag is that WPS Office replaces Times New Roman with Liberation by default. This can be solved by removing the symlink /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-liberation-conf

I've been using it since it was known as StarOffice! Currently I use AlienBob's packages for Slackware, and all I can say is that it is far superior to Micro$ofts much more expensive offerings. It is also genuinely cross-platform, being available for Mac and Windows as well. Its a really class piece of software!

--
Pete

Yesterday's announcement concerning the release of LibreOffice-6.2, overshadowed the news about 6.1.5.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.1

Just to save anyone else some time, my attempt to use the binary from the LibreOffice Web site via rpm2tgz failed with...

...unless I'm missing an easy workaround.

Like Kgha above I have OpenOffice installed from the rpms in the same way as my usual Office system. Compatibility with work and I know where the UI bugs are. I like to keep an eye on LibreOffice however as I admire their refactoring of a 20+ year old code base.

Can't make it work
 

Is anyone getting the download from their site to work?

I'm getting an error -
I made a mistake this morning and installed the rpms. But I later went back and did the rpm2tgz and then installed the tgz packages with installpkg. Do you think it is something related to having installed the rpms first? I have since removed the rpms.

Oops. Just noticed the post above. Looks like this is a problem with their install.

I tried 6.15 and it's working fine. I'll stay there for now until this gets sorted out.

FYI the 32bit 6.2.0 binary works fine. Just the 64bit has the problem mentioned above.
I guess it's compiled against some wayland stuff.

See this commit

So all we have to do is to set SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN before running soffice:
Thanks for sharing thew solution

B.R.

it's now included in /etc/profile.d/libreoffice.sh

Why not just Google Docs? Nothing to download.

A look at a sample of the kind of stuff I do (pdf) might answer your perfectly reasonable question.

Thanks very much to willysr for the variable to set and for showing us how to set the variable in /etc/profile.d

Why Google Docs? With a desktop app there's no Internet connection required, and that's a huge advantage wherever connectivity is spotty or inexistent.

That's nice work. All libre?

Yes, all OpenOffice 4.1.x and LibreOffice whatever I get from the rpms. Round trip editing at work (Windows 10 for Education with OpenOffice installed alongside MS Office 2013), and between my Slackware laptop and desktop at home.

I've been using OpenOffice (and Libre) since the v1 days so I have basically got used to it and its quirks, and I particularly like the maths formula editor, which uses an eqn like code. I don't process data of any size and I don't need advanced layout functions. I also don't need to exchange files with MS Office people that often. So my 'use case' is nice and simple.

I did try Calligra's Words, but not compatible for graphics objects with oOo/LO so not usable for me.

Did this work for you? I'm still having the same problem.

Of course.
I put it in ~/.bash_profile, so it's set when I log in.

I just got it to work. I did as you did and added it to ~/.bash_profile.

For documents I don't mind Google having access to, which I don't need to edit on my actual physical system, that's fine.

For documents I'd rather keep private, and for documents I'd like to edit without a network connection (I frequently do personal work on my laptop from a diner), having applications actually on my system are a must.

jove is my every-day editor, xfig and inkscape for drawing diagrams, sel and perl for processing structured data, and LibreOffice for the fancier stuff (even though I'm usually just using it to convert spreadsheets to .csv, or word files to .pdf).

These all work fine on Slackware.

You might need to reboot as those file is sourced during boot

That is not true.

No need to reboot.
You can just logout and login back again. Or just source the file:

I will test LO 6.2.0 for a couple of days on my test box just to see whether I'm affected by any bugs. Over the years I've had a particular interest in about 20 bug reports.

Some of the bugs, especially with mail merge, have caused me to fall considerably behind even the Still version.

I tend to use the SlackBuilds rpm version and use the Still version, from LO, until such time as Current has some of the major bugs fixed.

I can never understand why SlackBuilds and AlienBob always leap so quickly to the Current Version and leave us who need LO in a corporate environment to do our own thing.

I only have one bug report outstanding which should have been fixed in 6.2.0. I've already tested it after compiling it from my git clone.

[QUOTE=aikempshall;5960103]
I can never understand why SlackBuilds and AlienBob always leap so quickly to the Current Version and leave us who need LO in a corporate environment to do our own thing.
/QUOTE]

Take it all back! I see that AlienBob is still on 6.1.4.

For Slackware-current I usually compile the latest LibreOffice, but I did not have time last week to tackle 6.2.0 just after I had built 6.1.4. For Slackware 14.2 I try to stick with the older releases, but not always,

I think where I went wrong was I had multiple tabs open in "konsole". The export command may not xfer between tabs much like the source command for multiple tabs. When I did the export command in the tab that I was running Libre and sourced the .bash_profile there too it worked.

I'm using LibreOffice mostly to create presentation, and few other documents and it works very well. Thanks a lot to Eric for the Slackware packages!

For anyone who needs to create network diagrams I would recommend the VTS Network Equipment extension; you will probably find an icon for any kind of device that you may have on your network.

My one remaining bug has been fixed in 6.2.0 and with my limited testing it appeared to be good.

However I've just seen a new bug, in Calc, that effects time in that it appears that if you go over a certain threshold using a certain format codes Calc looses a minute.

So depending on your usage this version 6.2.0 might not be for you. I think problems with time in Calc is a major bug.

One bug that I submitted years ago to Openoffice was to add the ability to have split window for documents, like in many editors. A lot of of other persons requested that feature as well but still not added. Seems strange not to have it after so many years.

One thing I've noticed on the taskbar when running LO 6.2.0 was that the icon has changed from the calc/writer icon to what looks like a generic "X in an O". See attachment.

I can only put this down to LO dropping kde4 integration with 6.2.0.

Not sure what problems this will cause in the future, other than LO having a different feel.

I've been using LibreOffice since it forked from OpenOffice. I really like it and it works well. I use LibreOffice Calc and Writer most often with Calc being my number one use. I using it for accounting with a small non-profit. No real issues to speak off. Quite happy with LibreOffice.

no icon change here on Slackware64-14.2 with Sbo build of LibreOffice-6.2.0.3
john

Which SlackBuild the one from Christoph Willing or the one from Willy Sudiarto Raharjo?

The 'L' one from Chris

I'm using the 'l' one from Willy. I shall give the 'L' one a go, any tricks that I need to be aware of?

If I remember correctly I built it with the default slackbuild on a Qemu VM of 64-14.2 with updates installed.
So nothing special
Hope that helps
john

Thanks for that. I'll start another thread.

I voiced the opinion in https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...00#post5970800

that "LO has some way to go before being production ready for a pure qt5 kde plasma environment."

I switched to libreoffice (from openoffice) when it supported importing my old lotus wordpro files. As with anything that Oracle has touched, openoffice stopped getting updates, so I switched, and I haven't looked back. thanks Eric for his build of LO which I use on Slackware. Going back a year or two I had problems with calc crashing when using scripting for a fancy spreadsheet, but after reporting it, and going through some diagnostics with devs, the devs fixed the bug, so that it stopped crashing. So if you are prepared to do some work, you can get some problems fixed, which is more than can be said for bugs I've found on other office suites.
The down site is it (LO) needs java for scripting and accessibility support, and is a bit slow to start, even on a modern pc with ssd.