IBM Releases Lotus Symphony 1.0
Linked by Adam S on Mon 2nd Jun 2008 19:59 UTC
Features, Office Last week, IBM unveiled the first version of their OpenOffice.org offshoot, Lotus Symphony. Symphony is aimed at professional users in a corporate environment, but brings to OpenOffice.org many UI enhancements in an attractive, single tabbed interface. Symphony 1.0 runs on Windows and Linux; while the site used to suggest a Mac version was forthcoming, there is currently no reference to a Mac native version of Symphony. The Lotus Symphony website has been updated to reflect the recent release, however, downloads are very slow at the moment "due to high demand."
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Stappjarv
Member since:
2006-01-26

So have you tried passing around Writer-documents between Linux and windows? OO2.2 and OO2.4? It's not a smooth ride. Blank pages appear from nowhere, equations and illustrations move around.

As a little plus, Open Office also lacks support for the Star Office-formats that I used some eight or ten years ago. Word at least still is able to read Office 97-files.

PDF is still the only way to pass around formatted documents, and pure text remains the only completely smooth way to exchange data when on different platforms and/or program versions.

Reply Parent Score: 1

unoengborg Member since:
2005-07-06

So have you tried passing around Writer-documents between Linux and windows? OO2.2 and OO2.4? It's not a smooth ride.


That may be so, but it is less costly to upgrade everybody to the same version than it is to upgrade everybody to the same version of MS-Office. Besides, OOo is very good at saving to PDF.

Reply Parent Score: 5

msundman Member since:
2005-07-06

OOo is very good at saving to PDF.


No, it's not. OOo is awful at saving to PDF. The PDF export is picky about fonts and it doesn't support EPS (which is the only vector format that OOo supports even partly without making a mess of it all).

Reply Parent Score: 2

MaxKlokan Member since:
2007-12-04

... and pure text remains the only completely smooth way to exchange data when on different platforms and/or program versions.


Apart from that pesky newline conversion problem :-)

Reply Parent Score: 3

chemical_scum Member since:
2005-11-02

So have you tried passing around Writer-documents between Linux and windows? OO2.2 and OO2.4? It's not a smooth ride. Blank pages appear from nowhere, equations and illustrations move around.

As a little plus, Open Office also lacks support for the Star Office-formats that I used some eight or ten years ago. Word at least still is able to read Office 97-files.


You are wrong about the Star Office format support. I just searched my hard drive and found a 2001 writer document saved as a .sdw. It opened perfectly in OOo 2.4. IBM has dropped the support for the old StarOffice formats in Symphony but OOo keeps supporting them right back to StarOffice 1.0 formats.

With regard to the transfer of writer documents between Linux and Windows (and vice versa). Are you using the MS core fonts in the documents created using Linux (do you have them installed)? If you don't then you will have font conversion problems that could effect formating.

Reply Parent Score: 2

Stappjarv Member since:
2006-01-26

Well I'll be (...) !

A year ago or so, I was enormously annoyed when I was looking through some old school stuff, and couldn't access the star office-documents

And now they open without a hitch. Was the star office-support gone from 2.2 in ubuntu, perhaps?

I did not have the core fonts installed up until now, hopefully that will make things better at home. The problems when moving between 2.2 and 2.4 at the different (windows) labs at university must be due to something else though.


Thanks for your good reply!

Reply Parent Score: 1

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