[plug] OpenOffice.org 1.1

[Leon Brooks]

I've just had a "play" with OOo 1.1b3 (I needed one of its new features 
for a particular project) and I have to say I'm _seriously_ impressed.

The spacing of text in menus and the framework stuff looks a little bit 
odd (too open) but the app itself is blindingly fast compared with 
1.0.2 (like 3 seconds startup - with progress bar - instead of over 20) 
and has a bundle of neato features, all of which seem to work as 
advertised.

The feature I needed 1.1 for was Flash export, and that works 
flawlessly. The only thing I would ask for before using it as an actual 
presentation technique (ie a portable Impress/PowerPoint replacement) 
is a way to back up through the presentation. It turned a 
graphics-heavy 695kB SXI file (Which exports to 709kB of PPT) into a 
428kB SWF whose native resolution appears to be about 1000x1000.

PDF export also works very well, although the files are 10x larger than 
the Flash and seem to lose the text antialiasing. It exports with the 
whole page set to the background colour, rather than a rectangle of 
backround colour on a white true-background as several other systems 
do. I now have no less than three ways of turning a document into a 
PDF; via OOo, via CUPS and via SaMBa.

The window management has also been somewhat unbundled, which works well 
for me. Instead of having child windows obviously created and managed 
within OOo itself, I get floating KDE windows for things like the 
Stylist which of course gives me full KDE featuritis for them and looks 
more consistent too.

I'm off to throw the MS-Windows version of it at a customer suffering 
from multiple independently-failing MS-Office versions. Jacqueline, 
feel free to do some back-pounding at your next OOo meeting, this is 
*great*! (-:

Cheers; Leon