A.P. Lawrence

2005/04/11 NeoOffice

NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice to the native Mac OS X GUI. Yes, yes, I know: you can run it in X11. Well, let me just say this: I don't see the point of firing up another GUI inside a perfectly good GUI that I already have. OK, sure, maybe Mac should use X instead of doing its own thing, but there it is, and I and many other Mac users just don't want to bother with X11. No offense, nothing wrong with X11, but it's just another layer that I'd rather not have on my Mac. I was therefore rather pleased to stumble upon this.

Truth be told, I have very little need for NeoOffice or any kind of office suite. My favorite editor is vi, for programming, HTML and just about anything else I'm writing. However, people do have the annoying trait of sending me Word documents (which I truly appreciate when the humongous Word attachment turns out to contain something pasted from a text screen!), and unfortunately I have to read them - well, that's not quite true . For customers, of course I say nothing, and though I may mutter under my breath, I do the conversion. Salespeople pitching something I have no interest in get different treatment. Sometimes I turn it into an intelligence test: "Gee, I run Unix and can't read your Microsoft document. Can you send it in some other format?" Not that I had any intention of reading it anyway..

So, my need for any of this is very limited, which is all the more reason I don't want to fire up X11. In fact, because I have yet to find a single X11 package I NEED to run on my Mac (there are several Linux boxes close at hand), I removed X11 entirely sometime ago. I let Appleworks handle the Microsoft stuff, and it usually does a reasonable job.

Not always, though. I was hoping that NeoOffice might do a better job. However, as I have very little seat time with any office product, never mind this, I was momentarily baffled as to how it could be used for this purpose. If you open a .doc file with Appleworks, it fires up MacConverter and it either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, you don't get the file. That doesn't seem to be the case with Neo - I fed it a file that I though was OK, and it happily opened it, but with all binary "garbage" brought right in. Ugh. But then I realized this was a "broken" file - even Word wouldn't open this one, so I realized that's actually good - better extra junk than nothing at all. And, even more happily, when I fed it a less broken document, it cheerfully and quickly converted and opened it.

So there we are. It does everything I need it to do.. admittedly not much, and also achievable with far simpler tools like antiword (though antiword refuses my broken .doc also)..

Psst - Wanna work for yourself?

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