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OpenOffice 3.2 - will it work better than OO3.1.1 ?

Started by Pete, 2010.10.28, 17:25:16

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Andi710

Quote from: melf on 2010.10.28, 22:22:47
What makes me most disappointed is the missing support for "drag-text", which we have in the "odinized" version, but not in the native. I've brought that up to the support for several years now.

I asked Yuri Dario about it on netlabs IRC a couple of days ago, because this is my number one cmplaint for years as well. He sais that d'n'd is very complex within OOo and he doesn't have the resources to work on this topic. I offered some funding for it (as the community was funding Qt and many other bounties) - but Yuri maintains it makes no difference, as coders are missing.

Maybe Rich Walsh can help out as soon as FF4 is stable...

melf

Thanks for info Andy, it's good to know what to expect even if it's bad news. Cut and paste will do, but the drag feature is really smooth.
/Mikael

IBManners

I'm so use to not using drag n drop now, its just a low priority. Probably a higher priority for others that use OO under different platforms all the time. So for me D n D isn't important.
I am the computer, it is me.

Andi710

Quote from: IBManners on 2010.11.04, 03:38:36
I'm so use to not using drag n drop now, its just a low priority. Probably a higher priority for others that use OO under different platforms all the time. So for me D n D isn't important.

Does it make OOo unusable - no? But I find it a really strange situation that I can drag and drop text between my web browser (firefox) and a VIO window (FileCOmmander/2) or my eMail composing window and enhanced editor (for LaTeX). Just not into, ot of or even within my latest and greatest WYSIWYG _text_processing_ application. ;-)

In addition, al lthe nice feature of DragText depend on basic enablement. Would be so good to drop text onto the title bar in order to open a small window temporarily storing the text or right to the desktop to save this bit of information permanently.

Pete

Hi All

I've been playing with OO3.2.0 for Windows and the recent Odin build.

The Writer bit works fairly well and has no problem creating Labels and Business Cards - unlike OO3.1.1 for OS/2 here. There is a codepage problem I think as I'm getting non-English characters displayed in existing documents. Any ideas how to set Odin codepages to overcome this?

Regards

Pete


Blonde Guy

Quote from: Pete on 2010.11.04, 22:55:51

The Writer bit works fairly well and has no problem creating Labels and Business Cards - unlike OO3.1.1 for OS/2 here.


OpenOffice for eCS works for labels here. I found the templates on-line. I didn't try business cards, but why wouldn't they work?
Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

Pete

Hi Neil

I've no idea why OO3.1.1 as supplied with eCS2.0GA simply crashes with no log and no entry in os2popup.log whenever I try to create a label or business cards.

Sadly eCS OO support has no idea either...

I did think that despite the md5sum check being correct for the downloaded ec2 cd3 iso file that there may be some possibility of corruption so downloaded the file again - saved it to a new filename, burnt a new cd and tried a reinstall but no change in behaviour.

Your mention of templates may be related. Where did you find the templates you mention and where did you unpack them to?

Regards

Pete

Pete

Hi

No, the problem has nothing to do with Templates.

Still no idea on why OO311 crashes when trying to create Labels or Business Cards.

As the so called "support team" have no idea and it looks like they are not interested in resolving the issue I guess it is time to move on to a different operating system - OO311/320 on other operating systems (same hardware) simply does not have these problems.

Regards

Pete

melf

/Mikael

Pete

Hi Melf

A quick look at the urls supplied seems to indicate problems within the operating systems involved rather than problems with OO311.

Can anyone suggest what the equivalent problems would be in eCS?

Regards

Pete



RobertM

Quote from: Pete on 2010.11.14, 17:47:01
Hi Melf

A quick look at the urls supplied seems to indicate problems within the operating systems involved rather than problems with OO311.

Can anyone suggest what the equivalent problems would be in eCS?

Regards

Pete

That makes me wonder if it's a print driver problem. "Back in the day" when I was debugging and beta testing the new 32bit print engine for OS/2, we'd run into weird issues like that on a bunch of stuff. Some turned out to be how the presentation space was being registered by the app and some weird inconsistencies that were not being taken into account with the alpha versions of the new print engine. It took us a few months to help track down the particular issue, with code/alphas flying back and forth somewhat regularly.

Which brings me back to your particular issue... are you running CUPS? If so, your problem may be along the same lines - and could be why the Linux problems are relevant to the issue.

Best,
Robert


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
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Pete

Hi Robert

I doubt if it is a CUPS problem - but I am basing that doubt on the fact that OO311 is very happy to print using my CUPS printer.

The linux problems seem to be related to certain builds of KDE; 1 solution was to install the gtk(?) build of OO rather than the KDE build.

I guess the equivalent on OS/2 based systems could be e/xWP related but why should I be the only eCS(OS/2) user complaining about this problem?

I did discover that OO has an option to join the OO "improvement program" and when that is enabled an error report is produced when OO crashes instead of displaying the Label applet. I supplied the report to the eCS support team but have not had any response to date - maybe they need longer than a week to look into this. OTOH: I'm the only person with this apparently non-reproducable problem so maybe they are not that interested  :-(

I do have a workaround: I saved a blank Label page - of the required label type - in OO115 and now simply open that file when I need to produce labels. The same trick can be used for producing Business Cards. However, this should not be necessary; it simply means that OO311 is not working as it should.

I certainly will not be spending money to purchase eCS SSS in order to obtain the OO320 release until eCS OO support come up with some answers.

Regards

Pete

RobertM

Hi Pete,

I am not sure how CUPS does things, but the standard OS/2 print subsystem simply carves out another presentation space and allows drawing in it just like one would for standard PM stuff (even calling some of the same base functions... it's all pretty much (1) Create presentation space, (2) Querycaps, (3) draw - only real difference being handling the ps data returned via querycaps). The issues we ran into were often driverbase specific (ie: happens with OMNI but not PCL# or PS) due to handling of the presentation spaces. Sometimes it was very driver specific. The issues they are talking about (Linux world) seem somewhat similar in those respects - as well as their method of solving it.

Have you tried removing your printer setup (driver, etc) and then installing something very generic and well tested (yes, sans printer), and see if the results are the same?

Best,
Rob


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Pete

Hi Rob

Well, your suggestion about uninstalling my printer has opened another, possibly related, can of worms.

I was just rummaging through my printer settings and I noticed that on the Shares tab of the printer properties that "Not Shared" is the Current Status - which is correct - but "Start sharing at workstation startup" is Checked. That did not seem right to me so I Unchecked that.

Strangely the Current Status then changes to Active and the printer appears as a share in the Sharing and Connecting notebook (IBM File and Print client) !!!

If I Stop Share in the Sharing and Connecting notebook the Shares tab of the printer properties now shows Current Status "Not Shared" and "Start sharing at workstation startup" is now Checked again.

Either I'm misunderstanding something or it looks like I've found an error in eCS2.0GA - why would anyone want "Start sharing at workstation startup" Checked for something that should *not* be shared?


CUPS: How it works, briefly:-

The CUPS package plus various other packages that are required such as gutenprint and ghostscript in order to get the printer working with the CUPS package.

However this does not give us an OS/2 system printer. There are some extra steps required which involve installing the eCUPS.drv - basically the IBM postscript driver but with the CUPS PPD files installed instead of the usual postscript drivers - and the eCUPS port driver.

The eCUPS port driver needs to be selected as the output port for the OS/2 printer that uses the eCUPS.drv; this directs the output from the eCUPS.drv through to the CUPS package - which is how you get a raster printer to behave as a postscript printer on OS/2 systems.

Hope that gives you a brief overview  :-)

I will uninstall my current OS/2 printer and see if it makes any difference.

I will also report the above "share strangeness" to eCS in the hope (probably somewhat forlorn) that someone will be able to enlighten me as to this behaviour. I suspect it may have a bearing on the OO problem.

Regards

Pete







melf

According to "Start sharing at workstation startup", I think that this is always pre choosen.


A shot in the dark: Are you having some add-on that could interfere with your OO-setup?
/Mikael