OpenOffice for OS/2 and eComStation

Before jumping in and buying Open Office for OS/2 and eComStation, I decided to take a look at the Open Office web site to get some background information. I found navigating this site a little confusing, but eventually stumbled on the features page for OpenOffice (or simply OO as it is often referred to).

Although OpenOffice is touted as a multi-platform office suite capable of reading Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, when I looked at the System Requirements page, I was struck by the absence of any reference to OS/2 or eComStation, only after using the search box could I find any reference to OS/2 at all. There is however information on Serenity's web site concerning OpenOffice with links to OpenOffice.org

I could have downloaded then Windows version to try it out, but after reading about OpenOffice I opted to buy the OS/2 version itself. Two version are available in The Netherlands via Mensys, a CD or a digital version. There are also two language versions available, namely English and German (you can refer to previous OS/2 e-Zine articles on how to install your own language version of OpenOffice). The CD contains both languages the electronic download is language specific and is slightly cheaper at just under €40, about 48 US dollars (in the US the suggested retail price is $39) plus are no postal or packaging charges. Best of all it can be obtained almost instantaneously, if you consider 30-40 minutes on a broadband Internet connection instantaneous! The FTP server is here the limit not my connection. After the usual web based processing, credit card number etc, I can access the FTP server at Mensys and download the 86Mb file.

The main difference between the electronic version and the CD is that the CD contains, in addition to the installation files for OpenOffice, the prerequisite software listed below [Editor: not including OS/2 or eCS I think!] plus OpenOffice in both English and German. During the CD installation the language can also be selected.

The prerequisite software requirements are:

• A current version of OS/2 or eCs with Convenience Pack 1 or 2 or eCs 1.1
• InnoTek Font Engine for OS/2 (650Kb)
• InnoTek Runtime (2Mb)
• Optionally InnoTek OS/2 kit for Java (17Mb)

As I already have eCs 1.1 The first requirement is met. The Innotek products I had already downloaded using the eCs maintenance tool, but they are also available from Innotek's site itself.

The Font Engine is a port of the Freetype 2 font engine to the OS/2 platform. The advantages – according to the marketing info on InnoTek's site - are a tight integration with the OS/2 graphics subsystem for selected applications (read Mozilla and IBM Web Browser), an improved font rendering quality for both TrueType and Adobe Type 1 outline fonts, 8-bit (256 color) anti-aliasing for smoother font display, sub pixel rendering for LCD screens plus a better support for displaying Unicode font data and a more accurate character spacing.

To test the theory I looked at the eComStation home page with and without the font engine installed. I think it is a definite improvement. [Editor: Screen captures were supplied, but due to the JPEG compression, it is difficult to see much difference. Most of you will be familiar with the use of this Font Engine in Mozilla/2. Just imagine it applied to an office suite instead. By the way, you can get the Font Engine to anti-alias Smartsuite or other word-processors, or even the WPS itself, though it can be buggy since Innotek doesn't officially support this.]

One point to note is that if you have your screen set up for 256 colors or less your desktop will change color when then font engine is used, so if you haven't already rebooted after installing the font engine change your screen color depth to 32K or more and then reboot.

The InnoTek runtime for OS/2 is a software runtime environment used by Innotek's Win32 applications which of course OpenOffice is too. The idea behind this runtime is to have only one common runtime as opposed to various custom runtimes with various products which helps reduces the required amount of memory and improves application interoperability. The runtime I also downloaded and installed using the eCs maintenance tool.

InnoTek OS/2 Kit for Java (ver 1.4.2_04) is the latest Sun Java Standard Edition for Windows, delivering the most widely used Java environment to OS/2 customers. This runtime I had also downloaded and installed using the eCs maintenance tool. Note that although this is mentioned as optional you do see Java being called during the installation of OO. I had one instance in which I had not selected Java and thought that I had completed the install but certain parts were skipped and afterwards I could not complete the registration! I have however not been able to repeat this effect.

Installation:

Installation is straightforward by running INSTALL.EXE which will open an OS/2 window (see Fig 3). INSTALL.EXE will install the prerequisite software checking if it is already installed or not. First if necessary the Font Engine is installed, then a check on the presence of Crystal Audio Drivers prior to installing if necessary the InnoTek Runtime and thereafter optionally the InnoTek Java 1.4.2 runtime. For some reason the installation routine always wants to install Java. If like me you had already installed Java 1.4.2-04 then you can tell the installer to skip it. Reinstalling as far as I can tell has no side effects.

The last item on this OS/2 window is the start of the installation of OpenOffice itself. After entering Yes to install, a GUI information screen appears to take us through the various steps, Welcome, Important Information, Software License Agreement, User Data, Type of Installation (Standard, Custom or Minimum – Fig 4), Installation Drive and Directory selection, Optional Association Selection of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and HTML files to OO, and lastly the optional use of a Java environment. OpenOffice correctly detected my maintenance tool installed version The complete installation takes about 8 minutes including my slow typing.

Lastly a registration program is started to register OpenOffice (Fig 5). The easy way to fill this in is to import your email from your supplier in which your license number is given. Obviously you should export or copy your email to a text file first and then using the import function let the registration program do its work.

The relevant lines for the import to work are:

[OpenOffice.org]
Name=OfficeUser
Email=user@domain.com
Key=xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx

I ran into a small problem but thanks to the excellent telephone support form Mensys it was soon rectified. The problem was that I had copied the relevant lines from the email to a file but did not notice that my email address had been expanded with additional info in the form of mail to:

[OpenOffice.org]
Name=OfficeUser
Email=user@domain.com
Key=xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx

My desktop now has an additional folder (Fig 6) which contains the various OpenOffice programs.

A double click on Text Document and OpenOffice is loaded. On an Athlon XP 1700+ this takes almost 17 seconds! What was even more annoying is that opening Help also took 17 seconds every time I opened it. For some strange reason after a number of subsequent uses of OpenOffice opening a document it is reduced to 8 seconds and Help almost instantaneous. The screen looks similar to Word (Fig 7) although a number of icons are different. Information bubbles are activated whenever the mouse pointer is moved over an icon.

[click on image to view larger version]

If you re-run the install program you will be asked if you want to repair the existing installation. Strangely going through the complete repair procedure will give you a new icon on your desktop (fig 8)

This program (SETUP.EXE) starts a JAVA script in which allows you to Modify, Repair or Remove OpenOffice (fig 9). The removal is not truly complete. Although the directory OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 in INNOWIN is removed there are further references throughout INNOWIN to OO. Even the main executable SOFFICE.EXE is still present together with 1661 other specific files installed together with OO.

Compatibility

Let me first state that the documents I have used here represent only a cross section of my documents and are not a test in the real sense of the word. My first test was to try and see how accurately my Word files could be read and written. Word 97 .doc files seemed to be read 100% correctly although I did notice that the area beneath a picture was larger when read by OpenOffice such that the text overflowed onto the next page whereas it did not in the original. With Rich Text Files (which I had always assumed to be a standard exchange format ) only text was visible, all my drawings and photos where missing. Strangely if I imported in OO the same file in Word doc format and saved it as RTF I could read it in correctly back again in Word complete with photos. I had thought that RTF was a universal format but apparently this format is a proprietary format from Microsoft and is documented on their web site. You might ask does Microsoft meet their own spec or is it a fault in OO. Its basically academic. What is important is interchangeability, and that's not 100%, no matter who's fault it is.

Next I tried a spreadsheet. As far as I could see this also worked correctly but I had the same differences in the printed document with the last line of page 1 being pushed to page two in OO. With a PowerPoint presentation again there were differences. Although the presentation was the same some small differences occurred. In a slide show the slide transitions work automatically (if selected) but object transitions within a slide did not. As far as I can see there is no mechanism to have objects within a slide automatically perform the animation automatically after a set time. Pressing the mouse button during a slide show does however activate the animation. A video (AVI) which was in the original presentation is also not played. I did see the possibility to include video clips but this was grayed out on the menu. I also noticed that a word in a text box was broken in two as either the text box's width was too small or the text was too wide. I tried embedding the fonts in the original to see if this would help. It did not. To see if the compatibility issues in OpenOffice were OS/2 related I installed OpenOffice under W2K. The same differences were seen. Only with the text box by embedding the fonts could I resolve the problem.

Impressions

For example there is no format painter, its just not present in OO. A similar functionally is available via styles. If you merge cells in Excel you either use the icon in the toolbar, right click for Format Cells or via the pull down menu Format -> Cells -> Alignment add the tick to merge cells. In OpenOffice it's directly under the pull down menu as Merge Cells . If like me out of habit from Excel in OpenOffice you right click a cell and then follow the road Format Cells then you are presented with a notebook with 7 tabs and multiple options including the ability to rotate text a degree at a time, but no merge.

Living in The Netherlands I often need to switch languages. [Editor: Note this is not the same thing as changing the language of the application itself, just your document]. In Microsoft Office its under Tools -> Language -> set Language. In OpenOffice the function is hidden away under Format -> Character -> Language. But thats a learning curve which needs to be followed for every new program. Talking about languages it is very simple to add different languages. There is a predefined macro function which can be accessed via -> File -> Autopilot -> Install new dictionaries. The macro, called DicOOo, installed together with OpenOffice was version 1.2.4 supports 14 languages. Each language spelling list, hyphenation list, synonym list, can be downloaded from the net and automatically installed. The complete language list is even more impressive. At the last visit to the dictionary web page I found in excess of 20 different languages even when you count all the various English(5), German(5) and French(2) dictionaries as one each. When I started to install a new language, after the first connection to the OpenOffice web site I was informed that the existing version had been updated and was given the chance to download it. Don't download the document to the default directory given but, select the same directory as the current macro document which is ..:\INNOWIN\PROGRAM FILES\OPENOFFICE111\SHARE\DICT\OOO assuming you have used the default settings during the installation. The old macro will be updated and you will have now even more languages which can be automatically installed. After restarting OpenOffice (you can ignore the reference to quickstart -see paragraph Differences between Operating Systems) you should find in one of the three dialog boxes under Tools -> Options > Language Settings > Language > Default language for documents a tick against the language you have just installed as well as the original language.

OO is unlike Microsoft Office, IBM Works or any other Office suite that I know. Most suites are separate programs with a look alike skins whereas OpenOffice is one executable, SOFFICE.EXE, capable of working on different types of documents. There are five types of document which OpenOffice works with: Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation, HTML and Drawing documents. This makes interchangeability between the various document types better than between separate programs and the dialog's are truly common. Even simple things like the print dialog are exactly the same, unlike Microsoft Office in which it is subtly different for each program. Things like proxy settings for Internet have only to be set once and can be accessed in the pull down menu of any of the different document types under Tools -> Options -> Internet. Switching for example from a customers invoice (which is in the form of a spreadsheet) to a customers letter (a text document) is simply a question of selecting the required item (fig 10) via the pull down menu Window! This makes copying things between different types of document extremely simple

Although OpenOffice can read and write .doc, .xls, .ppt, and many other formats, the preferred format to save data in is XML (Extensible Markup Language) which is the compressed using the ZIP method. OpenOffice uses the following XML formats:

Differences between Operating Systems

There are a few differences between using OpenOffice under Windows and OS/2. The first striking difference is that under Windows OpenOffice starts quicker. This is accomplished by a so called Quickstart feature. The first time OpenOffice is opened in Windows the quickstarter is loaded which comprises of the bulk of code and loaded every system start thereafter automatically, unless deliberately disabled. The support for this function has been removed in the OS/2 version as has the support of the script language Phython Mobile Devices, and platform specific file dialogs. For OS/2 it is advised that Unicode characters should not be printed directly but to save as pdf (this function is available as standard in OO) print via the pdf format as some Unicode data can be lost. I tried various strange characters including the Euro currency symbols but did not find any problems. One cosmetic difference is the size of the fonts in the pull down menus at least if you are running with a screen resolution greater than 800 x 600. The pull down menus all are twice the size you would expect fonts are as if you are of 1024x768.

Although it is possible to open a text document and a spreadsheet document by double clicking each icon in the OpenOffice office folder on the desktop in turn, it is not possible to do this simultaneously without hanging the desktop. There are also various other situations which can repeatedly hang the desktop.

Bugs

Likes/Dislikes I will start with the dislikes as these are always the first things that spring to mind. I suppose the most annoying, just because of the frequency of use, is when you open a new document, either from within OO or by using the Open Document icon (fig 6). There is no direct selection of disk drive available. You have to use the directory up icon until you reach the root of the drive you are in and then you can see the various drives. This is in some ways an OS problem as under windows in addition to the file dialog additional icons are displayed one of which is “My Computer” which then displays the drive structure. The missing ability to assign keys to a special character. I miss the grammar check. The lack of a true format painter. The non standard OS/2 use of the left mouse button instead of the right one to move objects. The help facility which is somewhat vague.

What I do like is the border shown to indicate my text area. The graphics on/off icon so that I can switch off graphics to quickly scan through a document. The “direct cursor” function which allows me to move to a blank area of my document without first having to enter multiple carriage-returns. The PDF export capability. The brochure function which allows me to print two pages per sheet per side and by folding it down the middle create a booklet. The simple right click on a ruler and I can switch between various measurement units (Millimeter, Centimeter, Meter, Kilometer, Inch, Foot, Miles, Point and Pica) although some of these suck as miles and kilometers seem really superfluous. The ease of which objects can be selected and copied from the gallery with the mouse. The additional functions (133 if I counted correctly) when using a spreadsheet such as DEC2HEX (decimal to Hexadecimal), in fact all the additional functions left right and center which are in OO.

Conclusion