Abiword and Gnumeric was: Re: [plug] [link] Linus and the fire-hose

[William Kenworthy]

>From a users perspective: I use linux, OO and gnumeric daily in my paid
work.

abiwords word compatibility sucks.  I have been caught out a couple of
times by embedded diagrams, comments not showing up, invisble footers
and comments and looking a bit of a foolish when it has been pointed out
to me that the info was there, if only I had used a real (meaning
MSword) viewer, so abiword is off my list of serious word processors! 
OO does a good job though.

I am currently in a bind with spreadsheets: I am in the process of
creating some excel compatible spreadsheets of up 100Mbytes in size. 
Gnumeric will work with them stably, but saves in an excel format that
excel wont open (though smaller SS wwill open ok), and worse, gnumeric
wont open them either, though OO will - go figure.  OO will open both
gnumeric and excel created ones, but after opening (I think OO does the
same as excel and writes back to the source file), only OO can read them
when in excel format!  When excel opens them, it consumes all memory,
then swap (even gave it 2G swap) and it dies.  In excel, I have lost it
all 3 times so far last week with crashes on save, or just working with
the data in its own format!  Thank god for copies.

I am also not sold on OO for scientific use (gnumerics aimed more at
this segment) as in the past, odd things have happened.  It is also
limited to 32000 rows as against excel and gnumerics 64000 rows.
Gnumeric and OO do offer an extra column (256 vice 255) over excel
though.  Gnumeric is also very slow compared to OO and excel (easily
fastest).  e.g, gnumeric creates a huge xml table in memory before
printing and saving in its own gnumeric format - can easily exceed 2G in
footprint (I have to keep a manually mountable swapfile around to save
the "save" so to speak when it looks like using every scrap of ram and
swap.  Also can take 30 mins to save a spreadsheet that excel saves out
in less than a minute.  For some reason gnumeric saving in excel format
is nowhere near as bad.  OO is slower than excel, but not by much.

Some way to go yet folks!

BillK

On Sun, 2003-02-09 at 12:45, Harry McNally wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Feb 2003 11:55:44 +0800 Cameron Patrick
> <cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 11:05:03AM +0800, Harry McNally wrote:
> > 
> > | The only addition thus far has been OpenOffice.org on systems
> > | with >=128MB memory.    
> > 
> > Okay, I'm curious... What do you install on less memorable (is that the
> > right term?) machines for word processing and/or spreadsheets?
> 
> Abiword and Gnumeric
> 
> Abiword lacks tables but will work on doc and rtf otherwise.
> Gnumeric can operate on Excel 95 files.
> 
> Abiword has two bugs that we work around at the moment. If you zoom it
> will sometimes close and save the open file as <the_files.name>.CRASHED
> This is recoverable by restarting AbiWord and opening this file and SaveAs
> the_file.name and working on. We have a recent CompSci graduate who is
> working on this and is making progress (Thanks Luke). There is a bug posted
> that has been opened and closed, finally closed that should be fixed but my
> suspicion is that the developers are all running fast boxes now and don't
> see it happening as we do on 200MHz machines. Installed RAM doeesn't matter
> which my uninformed analysis may point to a race condition.
> 
> The other problem is that the Spell Check (british english .. yay)
> sometimes goes straight to the "Spellcheck Complete" dialogue when
> some words clearly have the red wiggle below them. It is possble to
> RMB select each underlined word and hints are offered at the top of
> the list (select to correct word) but it means working manually through the
> documant. A pain.
> 
> I'm not a heavy user of Gnumeric which is remiss of me. I've been using
> OOo for some designs calcs and power budget stuff that ended up in a
> spreadsheet.
> 
> What I've tried to do is run apps out of the CA distro eg Sylpheed in
> my office on the assumption that if I find the apps clunky then I
> shouldn't inflict them on other people :-)
> 
> All the best
> Harry 
-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>