Open Office, what is the next step

[chevy]

I use more and more Open Office, but I must admit that several details still make it "open to improvements".

Do you know of any plans to make it better on MacOS-X ? 1.0.3 is here for some time now.

[Viro]

OpenOffice development on the Mac is basically stuck. It'll be using X11 for quite some time to come, and the release of 1.1 isn't really fixed yet either.

A full Aqua port is meant to be available at in Q1 2006 (yes, 2006!!). We're in for a long wait before we get a native looking OpenOffice. The status of OpenOffice on OS X is available at http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html#tracks

In the mean time, you might want to check out NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org). Its OpenOffice without the X11 dependency. It uses Java as the rendering engine, and so the fonts just look *sweet*. I seem to be plugging this a lot lately, but it mainly because I like it. One of the big problems I've had with OpenOffice is that the fonts look crappy, especially when compared to other Aqua apps. NeoOffice solves this to a very large extent.

[pds]

I used OO a while ago, but it wouldn't let me paste stuff cut in safari for example. For me this makes it unusable as a basic tool. Does the Java version allow pasting from aqua apps?

[Viro]

Nope. NeoOffice still doesn't support pasting from the OS X clipboard. Its something they're working on. Here's the page which lists the features of NeoOffice, and the bugs. http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/features.php