# LibreOffice appears to have a very healthy group of code contributors



## overmind (Feb 5, 2012)

Just found that:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/04/200248/libreoffice-developer-community-increasingly-robust

"LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors."

Might be useful for people faced to choose between OpenOffice and LibreOffice.


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## wblock@ (Feb 5, 2012)

LibreOffice worked noticeably better than OO when I tried Impress from both recently.  LibreOffice has more dependencies, but what can you do?  Took about a day to build on a netbook.


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## jrm@ (Feb 5, 2012)

*facetious*



			
				wblock@ said:
			
		

> LibreOffice worked noticeably better than OO when I tried Impress from both recently.  LibreOffice has more dependencies, but what can you do?  Took about a day to build on a netbook.



Use LateX/beamer?


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## overmind (Feb 5, 2012)

There's a lot of redundant/unused code in OO. From what I've heard they try to clean that code.


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## estrabd (Feb 6, 2012)

jrm said:
			
		

> Use LateX/beamer?



That's crap on a crap stack, too.

* google docs
* for code -vroom (Perl), CodeMirror.js
* ppt (sorry :/)

:stud


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## jrm@ (Feb 6, 2012)

estrabd said:
			
		

> That's crap on a crap stack, too.



Let's each do presentation with serious math fonts. You do you yours in one of powerpoint / libreoffice / whatever and I'll do mine with LaTeX/Beamer and we'll compare.

P.S. The bikeshed *will* be *black*. ;-)


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## estrabd (Feb 7, 2012)

jrm said:
			
		

> Let's each do presentation with serious math fonts. You do you yours in one of powerpoint / libreoffice / whatever and I'll do mine with LaTeX/Beamer and we'll compare.
> 
> P.S. The bikeshed *will* be *black*. ;-)



If your presentation is just formulae and bullet points, fine. But, throw in source code and reasonable graphics, then managing that mess in Beamer is a nasty proposition.  I've defaulted to OpenOffice (Impress/Draw), but would love for something that allowed one to manage source snippets. I've found no good one, but know Beamer is not it. 

As an example, I started this presentation in Beamer, then moved to OpenOffice when I couldn't do exactly what I wanted - 

http://www.cs.uh.edu/~estrabd/openmp-combined.pdf

Beamer is excellent for having a document and presentation in one - I have seen this done with great success and would consider it in such a case.

The bikeshed can be black, but I'd seriously love to hear how people manage source code laden presentations.

Cheers,


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## wblock@ (Feb 7, 2012)

There was just some code posted on the AsciiDoc mailing list to generate Deck.js presentations, which look very nice.  Check out the different themes.  Generating that with AsciiDoc should make it very easy.


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## overmind (Feb 7, 2012)

It's true that there are better open source editing tools out there for pros. The idea is: that is a good thing *OpenOffice* and *LibreOffice* exists, because for a small company/startup/indie developer you do not have to pay licenses for OS and for an Office package.

Me either do not use *OO* or *LO* much. When I use it is just to open a Word Document and then export to PDF (yeah, there might be other better tools for that too). 

*OO* and *LO* replace MS Office with success. And do not expect to ask a secretary at a small company to use *Emacs* or *LaTeX*.

It's just good to know the evolution of such apps so when suitable we could recommend them to people who would use them.

By the way, I didn't know about latex-beamer. As I didn't know until yesterday about inkscape (but this is another story).


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## jrm@ (Feb 7, 2012)

estrabd said:
			
		

> If your presentation is just formulae and bullet points, fine. But, throw in source code and reasonable graphics, then managing that mess in Beamer is a nasty proposition.



LaTeX/Beamer certainly do have a steep learning curve depending on the background of the user.  As @overmind said, it might not be the best choice for a secretary (unless you have some cool hacker secretary coding with butterflies).  But, there is no problem at all with "source code" and what's this about reasonable graphics?  Graphics can display just fine with something like

```
\includegraphics[scale=.5]{blah.[png|gif|jpg}.
```

There are different packages for displaying source code. For example, http://schlitt.info/opensource/blog/0736_highlight_source_code_lines_latex.html.

Try an image search for LaTeX/Beamer and I think you'll find slides (frames) with more than just bullets.

Anyway, to each her/his own.  If Libreoffice is the right tool for what you're doing, good on you.  Choice is nice.  For my needs LaTeX/Beamer works because of its consistency with typesetting and the control you get with source code.


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## estrabd (Feb 7, 2012)

I find it interesting that Unix started out as a document processing environment (among other uses)...but, to the point that Beamer is difficult, it's not just that. 

It comes down to how I prefer to use it.

I want to have source code (LaTeX is excellent for \include'ing tex), but I also want to have graphics and whatnot pointing to specific parts of the code, have default highlighting (except for when I want to spot-change it), etc.

I could not have done that PDF I linked above in Beamer in a reasonable amont of time or skill, nor would have been very maintainable.

Don't get me wrong, like I have said, I've seen Beamer used with great success when combining a paper with a presentation. If I have the need for this, ever, I will definitely consider Beamer.

However, for some cases, WYSIWYG for presentations is ideal. The on drawback for OO is that the syntax highlighting plugins, for me, didn't really do what I wanted them to.

Anyhoo, I appreciate the comments and suggestions! I am not saying Beamer sucks - it has it's place like all of these other tools. No one can claim to be the "best" for all needs.

Cheers,
Brett


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## anomie (Feb 7, 2012)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> ... some code posted on the AsciiDoc mailing list to generate Deck.js presentations...



F%#$*@^ fantastic. I'm impressed.


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