Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [HEADSUP] libreoffice versus bison-2.5

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 16:38 on Sunday 22 May 2011, Indi did opine 
thusly:

> On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 12:10:01AM +0200, walt wrote:
> > On 05/20/2011 08:24 PM, Indi wrote:
> > > On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 12:50:01AM +0200, walt wrote:
> > >> For you users of unstable gentoo: the recent update of 'icu' broke
> > >> dozens of packages (as it always does) including libreoffice.
> > >> 
> > >> The problem is that libreoffice fails to build if you have bison-2.5
> > > 
> > > I have bison-2.5, but am using libreoffice-bin which seems fine.
> > 
> > Yes, that would be expected because bison is needed only at compile time,
> > not at run time.
> > 
> > I would be using libreoffice-bin too, except for a ridiculous change made
> > about a year ago in the way openoffice charts are scaled on the y-axis.
> > 
> > I complained bitterly on the openoffice 'chart' mail list, only to
> > discover that openoffice changed its perfectly good scaling algorithm to
> > ape a change made in M$ Office!
> > 
> > Nobody at openoffice.org would consider reverting that ridiculous mee-too
> > change, so I've been editing the open(libre)office source code to remove
> > it myself before compiling it.  I was very disappointed to find a major
> > open- source project following M$ around like a hungry puppy :(
> 
> It's unfortunate that we don't have small, fast, light, standalone
> programs to deal with the formats of word, excel, powerpoint, etc but
> if we did odds are most people would shun them for a big, bloaty
> office suite anyway. Personally, I'd love it if I could open and edit
> those office formats in vim...


What makes you think they don't *already* exist?

 * app-office/libreoffice-bin-3.3.2
         Total files : 8138
         Total size  : 498.24 MiB

 * app-office/koffice-libs-2.3.3
         Total files : 697
         Total size  : 19.45 MiB
 * app-office/koffice-data-2.3.3
         Total files : 214
         Total size  : 608.63 KiB
 * app-office/karbon-2.3.3
         Total files : 160
         Total size  : 3 MiB
 * app-office/kexi-2.3.3
         Total files : 337
         Total size  : 8.17 MiB
 * app-office/kpresenter-2.3.3
         Total files : 188
         Total size  : 9.28 MiB
 * app-office/krita-2.3.3
         Total files : 783
         Total size  : 26.10 MiB
 * app-office/kspread-2.3.3
         Total files : 337
         Total size  : 11.62 MiB
 * app-office/kword-2.3.3-r1
         Total files : 215
         Total size  : 7.82 MiB

Small, fast, light, standalone: yeah, they are all there.

Editing them in something vim-alike is highly unlikely to be useful - compare 
antiword. Office suites are gui programs and the gui layout is as important 
(if not more so) than the content. And I haven't even touched on graphics 
elements yet.

So you may be able to modify the content but probably not the layout. Have a 
look inside OOo source code sometimes for a look at what it takes to calculate 
something as "simple" as where on the page some text goes.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com