Open Office - Credit: OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org has created a new project, Rennaissance, to improve the GUI of their program.

Project Renaissance, to rethink the graphical user interface (GUI) and interaction of OpenOffice.org, was announced on OOoCon 2008 and has been officially launched this week. Renaissance is a long running project and will start from scratch, so please do not expect to see something in OOo 3.1.

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The Problem

Why do we run this project?

• OpenOffice.org users complain about its cumbersome and outdated graphical user interface (GUI)
• A great deal of functionality is hidden in many overstuffed toolbars, poorly structured menus and complex dialogs
• Functions are thus difficult to access for novice users or too inefficient to use for expert users
• In addition, the GUI offers an antiquated look & feel which is hardly capable to communicate innovation and to create joy of use

Our Mission

“Create a User interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users’ choice not only out of need but also out of desire.”

Sounds good. When can I have it? This sounds like it might be a while.

• GullFOSS
• Open Enterprise

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released yesterday, and servers are barely able to keep up with the onslaught of downloaders.

With enough people clamoring for OpenOffice 3.0 that the site’s server temporarily melted down, you’d expect the new release would have some impressive improvements over its predecessor. The stability and performance tweaks are there, especially in the Windows and Linux versions, but most of them aren’t the flashy sort of features that convince people to upgrade.

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Other noticeable changes in the new version of OpenOffice include some minor, but welcome, user interface enhancements, such as a much cleaner icon set, better zoom tools and a new start-up launcher that offers quick access to templates and previously opened documents. The Windows version even offers a shortcut icon which will take you directly to the launcher screen.

This is the best bad news they could hope for.

• Webmonkey
• OpenOffice.org

Easy PDF editing is coming to OpenOffice.org eventually, but you can get a plugin now.

Easy PDF editing is coming to OpenOffice.org, but you’ll have to be patient for a few months. Recently posted to the OpenOffice.org Extensions site, the Sun PDF Import extension (SPI) is only in beta, and only works with recent developer builds of OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is scheduled for September release. Right now, the quality of the final release is anybody’s guess, but the beta’s capabilities fall squarely in the middle of the available PDF import tools.

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By default, SPI opens PDF files in the Draw application, although you could also use Impress, which shares much of the same code. This default might seem strange at first, especially if your PDF file is text. Actually, though, using Draw is logical, given the limitations of the PDF format. No application — not even Acrobat, the proprietary PDF editor made by Adobe, the company that wrote the PDF specifications — is able to edit more than a single line while preserving format. Given this limitation, importing to Draw makes sense, because it can treat each line as a separate text object for editing. Although rearrangement of a paragraph requires line by line editing with SPI, and can be tricky if you need to add an extra line, the extension leaves you no worse off than any other PDF editor.

There you go Little Matt.  Now you edit that RMS poster from several months back like you wanted to.

• Linux.com
• OpenOffice.org