LibreOffice leverages Google’s OSS-Fuzz to improve quality of office suite

by jjuhl • 9 years ago

110 70 9 years ago

taeric4• 9 years ago

It isn't the presence of bugs that drives me from this suite to MS office. It is the fact that everyone else is using it, and interop is terrible.

TheAdamAndChe2• 9 years ago

That's understandable, and it's great that you are able to utilize the expensive products available. As a counter, I am a broke college student that values my privacy, and I make frequent use of LibreOffice. While complete professional market penetration would do wonders to LibreOffice by increasing awareness of more bugs and bring in more developers, it isn't necessary to be very useful to some. The freedom to have the choice between the widely used product and the slightly buggy but free product is very nice to me.

taeric4• 9 years ago

My point would be to do whatever to improve interop. At the least, focus on ux. Intrinsic quality of the code does little to address this, as much as we developers want otherwise.

And as a student, I definitely used free options. I encourage that use. Just don't think you will make much inroads in the commercial world. Until you can use all of the commercial world.

krrrh2• 9 years ago

I was at a conference last year where @patio11 performed a rap trying to persuade people to do all their writing in markdown. I wish I could simply link to it as an argument from authority, but consider the value of doing your writing in plaintext. You will benefit from editor choice, flexible tooling, version control, and forward compatibility. There are a lot of tools out there for "compiling" from markdown to a nicely formatted pdf, rtf, docx, or odt file.

I've got a pile of inaccessibile old university papers that for some reason are in Aldus Pagemaker format.

Edit: typo

yeukhon• 9 years ago

I used OpenOffice then LibreOffice for about two years. I did a lot of homework and presentations from LibreOffice, including my senior thesis.

I switched to MS Office 2011 and then MS Office 2016 afterward. The 2016 suite is by far the best from UI design to response time. Besides interop (since at work everyone uses MS Office suites) (I am using Outlook at work so I don't bother with a separate Office suite), but also because of stability and performance. Perhaps now LibreOffice is better, but I am going to stick to Office, plus I've an educational license (forgot if it's 4 or 5 years for ~$100) from using my university's email address.

pbhjpbhj2• 9 years ago

MS Word being able to open MS Word proprietary format files isn't "interop".

You can claim MS Word is good at interop if it can open, display, and save the other main wordprocessor file formats with good verity.

Arguably you'd want [reverse] interop as part of that too, that MS would openly publish all details of their formats to enable other programs to use those formats.

What you describe is using a format for the benefits of the monopoly position of that format. That's very different from interop. I'm not saying you're wrong to do that, just IMO wrong to describe it as interop.

jbmorgado2• 9 years ago

In big scientific projects we are now using Google Docs.

Although not a totally Open Source workflow, it does provide the possibility of using it in any system we personally work and makes sharing and editing documents from various parties much easier.

For me, this signals a paradigm shift at least in academia where we would normally use open source in various places, but revert to Office to write collaboration documents and proposals (and even scientific papers in some areas like biology).

mkesper• 9 years ago

What will happen when Google stops offering that service (like they did with so many others)?

dewan_• 9 years ago

well, libre office is also working on a fully functional online office suite.

WalterGR8• 9 years ago

Google Docs... Although not a totally Open Source workflow

It seems like it's not open source at all.

unixhero• 9 years ago

Interoptability really isn't terrible for general purpose stuff

makecheck• 9 years ago

For me it’s the bugs in Microsoft Office that make me want to avoid it at all costs.

Microsoft Office isn’t some side project tossed together last weekend, it is a decades-old product from a company with billions of dollars and thousands of engineers. Therefore, it should be able to create new items in a bulleted list without completely destroying indentation, it should be able to handle pasted text without utterly confusing the style of everything else, and it should not completely fail to save customization of the Ribbon (to name just a few things still true in 2017).

If a product costing hundreds of dollars is going to misbehave like someone’s open-source side project, then I would rather invest in the open-source side project (at least that might get fixed).

curiousgal• 9 years ago

I remember coming across a comment from someone who worked on Word in the past. Most of the engineers don't know how it works and are scared of breaking backward compatibility.

ahiknsr• 9 years ago

link to OSS-Fuzz project https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz

yuhong• 9 years ago

I imagine that LibreOffice's Office binary format code is much different from MS Office's own and probably much more robust to invalid input. Of course, this comes at the cost of compatibility.

vxNsr• 9 years ago

I'm still waiting for someone to make a word process on the level of LibreOffice that will create a markdown document just as easily as it will a .doc and will allow me to convert between the two with ease.

discreditable• 9 years ago

Pandoc is pretty close to that.

slaymaker1907• 9 years ago

Pandoc with atom (and the enhanced markdown plugin) works quite well in my experience.

partycoder• 9 years ago

LibreOffice is functional, it does the work. But it still looks substantially like its ancestor Sun StarOffice, and many years have past since then. There are experimental features that enable a "ribbon UI" but they're still in the works.

I was looking into other office suites, other than the known ones such as Calligra suite (formerly KOffice) and GNOME Office, and ran into one called "WPS office", written in Delphi and C++ by a Chinese company called Kingsoft. http://wps-community.org/

The WPS UI looks very polished, I have to say. But I haven't used it much. Does anyone here have any thoughts about it?

hadrien01• 9 years ago

WPS' UI is polished indeed, with themes and tabs. It's better than LibreOffice for simple documents, but it has quite a few glitches for more "advanced" functionalities (at least on Linux): copying and pasting does weird things, figures aren't handled correctly, etc. It has better Microsoft Office compatibility for old documents, from what I've seen.

therealmarv• 9 years ago

Would rather see a good Chrome/VSCode like auto updating. Updating Libre office is a pain especially when you use another language. You are supposed to download and install the new version, run it once, then install the language pack.

Very very end user unfriendly IMHO.

j605• 9 years ago

If you use a system that requires an auto updater like Windows, then may be it is better if libreoffice can be made in to a store app so that it updates with other such apps.

﻿LibreOffice leverages Google’s OSS-Fuzz to improve quality of office suite

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