/tech/ - Technology★

office suites? Have you tried real tools? How about a nice cup of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8EKH_fjmXA

work requires me to use Google shit

>>1001927

The Spreadsheet is the main part of the "office suite" that I care about.

For text I already mostly use GVim/Markdown/Pandoc for my own stuff rather than LibreOffice Writer. Writer is for documents shared with people who are confused by the command line.

Would there be much advantage of switching to Groff over Markdown?

if you don't edit .csvs with ed you do not belong here

Anything other than MS Excel means you're doing it wrong.

If you use anything but pen and paper consider yourself excommunicated.

What's wrong with libreoffice?

>>1001925 (OP)

Group essays with normies at uni: Google Docs

Most documents: groff (yeah I watch Luke Smith)

More complex university stuff: latex

But nothing wrong with libreoffice.

I used to write rst until I discovered org-mode. I mostly just write short stories.

Getting a little into LaTeX but just a smidgen Don't know if I'll do anything with it.

For spreadsheets I just use LibreOffice because I haven't bothered to learn ses-mode yet.

>>1002038

I've seen his stuff on groff but just don't see much merit in it for documemts other than man pages. There's lots of other "plaintext" formats that are pretty much wysiwyg.

>>1001930

>Would there be much advantage of switching to Groff over Markdown?

Use Asciidoc. It's syntax is simple enough to use like Markdown but actually usable for anything halfway more complex than an email when you need it.

>>1002037

>What's wrong with libreoffice?

Plain text lightweight markup languages can be version controlled better for one. Even when you save as a flat XML you are still doing a 3-way merge on incomprehensible XML and base64 image embeds.

>>1002038

>Most documents: groff (yeah I watch Luke Smith)

Groff is much faster to compile than LaTeX, but it's output quality is worse, and its syntax is worse than something like Markdown, reStructuredText, Org or ASCII-doc. The only purpose I see in groff is manpages. Or if compilation speed is important, converting one of the higher-level markup languages (MD, reST, Org, AD) to groff rather than LaTeX.

>>1002045

>version controlled

If it's just about something I write myself why would I need that? Are you trying to reinvent file metadata like creation date?

>>1002153

>Stop talking about things I don't find relevant to my use case on a public forum.

Using a DVCS like git will let you replace Google Docs for collaboration. It sure beats sneaker netting "Copy (2) of Copy of Nigger studies project.odt" around.

>>1001925 (OP)

Sc-im is an fantastic spreadsheet program

And groff and markdown + pandoc is the 2 best options for document creation!

>>1001931

In all seriousness, CSVs are damn useful.

I'm using Open Office, but I rarely use the thing so I'm not sure how good it really is, if at all.

The problem with office suites is that they have a niche market. Howso?

Well anything business-related will use MS Office 9/10 times. College students and any home use >25 will use Google Docs 9/10 times. Professionals will use professional-grade solutions as have been offered itt. This leaves a very niche market for non-MS office software, namely freedom-minded (as in speech) college students (who are probably on the broker side of the average college student) and freedom-minded (as in speech) authors (again, not the richest people on earth), and finally free-minded (as in beer) individuals who don't give a damn about ones rights. None of these camps are likely to donate to projects, or (aside from maybe college students) be devs who will contribute.

/tech/, whatever that means (I assume you mean the majority opinion of this board?) may not like libreoffice because it's a copy of MS-office, with which Microsoft created a market to sell their product to. If it wasn't for MS-office, chances are we'd all know LaTeX and wouldn't be having this conversation.

>>1002636

>Open Office

Is someone going to tell him or should I?

>>1002836

what do you have against Apache OpenOffice? https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html

>>1002841

OpenOffice got taken over and pretty much everyone left it to work on Libre Office in 2011 or something.

Open Office started getting updates again, but it is "open source" whereas Libre Office is libre.

There is no reason to use Open Office over Libre Office

>>1002843

Its worse than that. When Oracle bough Sun MicroSystems (the last vestige of innovation and quality), the community that was strangled by Sun feared it may be suffocated. Oracle had already committed many injustices, and practically overnight dozens of developers forked and re-released the software and formed The Document Foundation. Possibly one of the greatest successes in the war against the war against Liberty.

> Sun was purchased by Oracle Corporation in early 2010. OpenOffice.org community members were concerned by Oracle's behaviour towards open source software, the Java lawsuit against Google and Oracle's withdrawal of developers and lack of activity on or visible commitment to OpenOffice.org, as had been noted by industry observers -- as Meeks put it in early September 2010, "The news from the Oracle OpenOffice conference was that there was no news." Discussion of a fork started soon after.

t. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

>>1002832

Some countries/municipalities have started adopting LibreOffice to avoid paying licenses and because they legit need to store all their shit in open formats.

>>1001930

>Would there be much advantage of switching to Groff over Markdown?

Groff is a typesetting system and Markdown is a markup format, totally different things. You can write in Groff and you can print Markdown, but the former is a pain and the latter is ugly.

The proper way of using Markdown is to convert it to something lower-level like LaTeX, Groff, HTML or whatever. You could for example have a converter that takes your Markdown files, convert them the Groff format, and runs groff on it to produce a PDF which you print out.