313. Which Office for linux users? Libreoffice, Openoffice, Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, Microsoft Live/Skydrive, Wine/Office2003 and Office2003 in Virtualbox, WPS Office

UPDATE 6 Apr 2013: I've added WPS Office

UPDATE 10 Feb 2013: I've tried Libreoffice 4.0 as well -- no improvement in terms of rendering vs Libreoffice 3.5.4 (below). The start-up times are greatly improved though.

UPDATE 4 Feb. 2013: Equation Editor in Office 2003 on Wine used to be supported -- however, while fixing the editor in office 2010 support for older office versions broke. This will (hopefully) be fixed in future versions and the codeweaver and wine devs are aware of the issue. Bug reports to that effect:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32697 and http://www.codeweavers.com/support/tickets/browse/?ticket_id=931759

Most of my publications are via collaborations, and I'm more or less the only one who uses Linux. When I'm in charge, I use latex -- but you can be a zealot, or you can be a pragmatist. Life tends to be easier for the pragmatic. I draw the line at actually using a native installation of Windows though.

A few things are important: figures should render ok, endnote should render ok, I need to use track changes and I should be able to insert equations. Oh, and the templates from the major publishers (RSC, Wiley, ACS) should work.

So, once and for all (well, I should revise this for each major version I suppose) here's an evaluation of  where each solution on Linux falls short and where it does well.

I mocked up a simple article style doc file using Word 2003, Endnote X and Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 and the Angewandte Chemie template, and then opened it in various alternative solutions.

I tried:

• LibreOffice
• OpenOffice
• Lotus Symphony
• Abiword
• Google Docs/Drive
• Microsoft Live/Skydrive

Here's what I found:

NOTE: when I say 'good' or 'bad' I mean how well they reproduce the look which is found in Word 2003. It's not a judgement on the quality of the word processor as such. I also recognise that for a developer it isnt much fun spending time working on reproducing someone else's crappy and poorly documented software, when you could be implementing new and wonderful things instead.

Outcome: all non-Word 2003 solutions at a minimum had the figure move slightly relative to the text. All solutions did the Endnote references ok, if not the location of them. Some solutions had issues with the greek letters in the equation. All non-MS solutions rendered the equation as an image which couldn't be edited.

See for yourself...


Office 2003/Virtualbox
This is the canonical version -- this is how it was created and how it should look.

Word 2003 in Virtualbox

Libreoffice 1:3.5.4+dfsg-4 
Looks fine, but
* The numbering for the equation (put it there using a tab stop) is too far left
* part of a paragraph now separates the figure from its caption -- the picture hasn't moved, but the first column on the first page seems to be one line shorter, which pushes the text of the previous paragraph past the figure.
* The last paragraph doesn't end on the first page, but in the first column of the second page..
* The second page also looks different, with the endnote bit moved to the second column.

LibreOffice

Openoffice 3.4.1-1
I grabbed the latest debs from http://www.openoffice.org/download/other.html#tested-full
On the second page the Endnote references are in the right place (c.f. Libreoffice).

* Greek letters in Equation replaced by squares (missing font?). (greek letters in text is ok)
* The numbering for the equation (put it there using a tab stop) is too far left
* part of a paragraph now separates the figure from its caption -- the picture hasn't moved, but the first column on the first page seems to be one line shorter, which pushes the text of the previous paragraph past the figure.
* The last paragraph doesn't end on the first page, but in the first column of the second page..

OpenOffice

Lotus Symphony 3.0.1
I downloaded the Lucid i386 deb and installed it in an Ubuntu Lucid virtual machine. Symphony is based on OpenOffice.

* Greek letters in Equation disappeared completely. (greek letters in text is ok)
* The numbering for the equation (put it there using a tab stop) is too far left
* part of a paragraph now separates the figure from its caption -- the picture hasn't moved, but the first column on the first page seems to be one line shorter, which pushes the text of the previous paragraph past the figure.
* The last paragraph doesn't end on the first page, but in the first column of the second page..
* The second page also looks different, with the endnote bit moved to the second column.

Lotus Symphony

Office 2003/Wine
See here for installation: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/307-installing-office-2003-in-wine-on.html
Everything looks fine with one pretty important exception:
* The equation is missing completely. Note that other people may have better luck installing Equation editor under wine -- I haven't managed to install it at all.

Word 2003 in Wine

Abiword
Plenty of issues:
* The author box has move to the top left corner.
* Can't find the table
* Greek letters missing in equation
* Greek letter in text missing
* Lots of stuff missing or misplaced (e.g. Keyword background picture)

Abiword

Google Docs
This was the big surprise -- I've always thought that google docs was essentially as 'good' as Microsoft Office. They have a financial incentive to be, after all. Turns out that the document was all but unrecognisable when opened in Google Docs. By far the worst solution. Note: the out-of-date warning is triggered by Chrome 18. Most similar to Abiword.

Google Docs

Microsoft Live 

Yes, that's right -- Microsoft Live works on Linux. This is the free version you get via Hotmail/Skydrive -- not their Office 365 or whatever they use now.

There are more surprises -- it doesn't render the document faithfully.

View:

* The numbering for the equation (put it there using a tab stop) is too far left. (like Libreoffice)
* part of a paragraph now separates the figure from its caption -- the picture hasn't moved, but the first column on the first page seems to be one line shorter, which pushes the text of the previous paragraph past the figure. (like Libreoffice)
* The last paragraph doesn't end on the first page, but in the first column of the second page. (like Libreoffice)
* The last paragraph doesn't end on the first page, but in the first column of the second page. (like Openoffice)
In other words -- Libreoffice/Openoffice do just as well as Microsoft Live

The interface for the View mode

full -- and no, you can't zoom in and out...

Editing:

In editing mode all it looks like a mess -- see figures.

In addition to the obvious formatting mess,

* greek letters in text show up as squares (problem with fonts on my computer or problems with live?)

* The equation cannot be edited.

However, once you go back to View mode the formatting is restored -- but it'd leave you flying blind while trying to make changes.

Editing mode

The full document -- yes, there's no Zoom...

WPS (Kingsoft)
I only discovered this by accident. Kingsoft (金山软件) is a legitimate Chinese company (Star Office was big in the 90s) and somehow there's a linux version (i386) of their Office suite: http://linux.wps.cn/. The bad news is that it's in Chinese, but that doesn't stop me from evaluating it -- it's such a close copy to Office 2007 that you can pretty much guess how to use it.

You can download it by clicking on this link: http://wdl.cache.ijinshan.com/wps/download/Linux/unstable/wps-office_8.1.0.3724~b1p2_i386.deb

It seems to be reproducing the file pretty well, with the exception of how it renders the equation and the missing stars in the author affiliation section. However, the location of the figure caption is correct, and the second page looks good.

And here's how it looks:

306. Insync with Google Drive and Google Docs on Debian Testing/Wheezy

The problem:
1. It would be nice to be able to use Google Docs as a replacement for Microsoft Word until Libre/OpenOffice catch up (post about that later) or the world switches to LaTeX and
2. for that to happen there needs to be an easier way to sync documents between google docs and your harddrive than using email.

The closest thing to that is using Google Drive to keep documents synced, and opening them in Google Docs using your browser.

It's been more than half a year since promising that Google Drive would be available for linux, and Google has yet to actually release anything (here) and it almost looks like vaporware (here).

In lieu of an official solution, there are a few options. One is Grive -- which seems to work with Google Drive but not Google Docs -- and another one is Insync, which isn't open source as it is owned by a start-up. It's the most promising and full-featured solution though, so we'll go with that.


There used to be gdocsfs, but it doesn't seem to be maintained.

The usual caveats about installing things from outside the repos apply, and even more so in this case since the source code is not available.

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Setting up Insync

sudo apt-get install xdotool python-nautilus libxdo2 gir1.2-nautilus-3.0
mkdir -p ~/tmp/insync
cd ~/tmp/insync
wget http://s.insynchq.com/builds/insync-beta-gnome-cinnamon-common_0.9.34_amd64.deb
wget http://s.insynchq.com/builds/insync-beta-gnome_0.9.34_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

If all went well you'll find InSync installed (move mouse to top-right corner, type insync and it should be there). Clicking on it opens a browser tab, in which you're asked to select the gmail account you wish to use.

You're next asked to allow InSync to do various things:

Confirm (you'll then get an email) and associate your machine with the account.

You should now have a new set of folders in $HOME:

/home/me/Insync/
`-- me@gmail.com

If you create a directory either in ~/Insync/me@gmail or in google drive using your browser, the directory should show up in both places (i.e. it's synced) -- assuming that you've got insync running:

insync --headless > /dev/null &

will keep it running in the background. Any doc file copied to the insync folder will now be editable in Google docs by pointing your browser to https://drive.google.com/#my-drive

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Simple as that.