Re: [tlug] Linux on Japanese TV News

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave Brown writes:

 > For MacOS X, you should be using NeoOffice, which is OpenOffice
 > with proper Macintosh widgets.  It's perfectly acceptable on my G4
 > Cube with its blazingly-fast 450MHz CPU.

What do you mean by "is OpenOffice"?  It's a derivative of the same
codebase, with no variants except in display widgets?  Is it
reasonably up-to-date with the parent codebase, if so?  Does it seem
likely to stay that way (ie, it has an organization with sane
management and development muscle behind it)?  And what does
"acceptable" mean?  Is that your personal opinion, or is that the
consensus of an organization of 10,000 members?

Remember, that's where this thread started: discussion of migrating an
organization of some size (in my case, about 10,000, with a half-dozen
clusters of 50 members each being my guess at the necessary scale to
start the ball rolling) away from Windows/Word/Excel.  What I want is

  o a cross-platform suite
  o possibilities of migration to Linux or similar without changing
    the look/feel, preferably the brand, of the office suite
  o acceptable handling of Windows/Word and Windows/Excel docs,
    where "acceptable" means that document formatting and glyph
    spacing does not change visibly on screen or printed page, that
    the WYSIWYG correspondence between screen and page is pretty well
    maintained, and that documents round-trip will in both directions
    (ie, both A -- copy --> B -- edit --> B -- copy --> A and
    B -- copy --> A -- edit --> A -- copy --> B and work without loss).
  o live demo without install

for the purpose of convincing people who *are* dependent on office
suites.  They will be using platforms of a broad range of power,
configuration, and OS.  They will continue to do so; there is no way
that there will be an organization-wide standard platform.

Open Office intends to be that cross-platform suite.  My experience
strongly suggest that s/in/pre/ is an appropriate transformation at
the moment.