The beauty of Rich Text files

On the 19th of March 2008 Microsoft released the latest incarnation to the Rich Text Format specification 1.9.1 to go with their new Office 2007... Interesting because Office '08 is available on the Apple Mac but the document doesn't mention that, and only shows images from Word 2003 on the PC.

Anyway... I'm working on a program to replace WordPad, not because I don't like WordPad but because I do, I just think that since it hasn't changed since Windows 95, and then not much from Write on Windows 3.x it could do with a little more... especially in the way of internet appliance... read and edit html, blog posts etc. So I'm writing my own, keeping the UI as much like WordPad (or Write) in it's default configuration as possible, keeping the code size small and the startup time fast, and ensuring that my replacement can do everything that the original can.

Access to the Rich Edit component (richedt32.dll or richedt20.dll) is a really quick way of maintaining a simple Word Processor, and it's mostly what has allowed WordPad to remain as current as it is. Every time Microsoft updates Rich Edit, WordPad gets that update automatically, because it's really just a user interface to that library. Of course, as the Rich Edit component gets new features (not just improvements to existing ones) WordPad falls behind... and Rich Edit is notoriously bug ridden from an API point of view. Interfaces that are documented as fixed and working fine don't actually do anything, and ones which are documented as having bugs under specific documented circumstances don't present those bugs under those exact same circumstances, but it's more a documentation issue than a code one... and, as previously stated, the library is now very very old.

So I'm using Rich Edit to get my program up and running. I'm passing Rich Text between it and my filters and modifying it at quite a low level. I'm testing my program with versions of richedt32.dll that came with Windows 95 and ones that come with Vista, and ones that are in the latest SP for NT4 and the compatibility libraries that are packaged with Wine. (Just to be safe) I'm getting Rich Text files from Macs from Next from Linux and Word Processors of every caliber.

"I really ought to know about the state of play with the format it's self, and have some idea how to re-implement or replace this library should the need arise in my program." I thinks... So I asked the inventor of the standard (Microsoft) what their present documentation on this open standard for information interchange is.

I received a docx file... (though it seems they have a .doc up now too)

Okay... I've had docx files before, I've got translation filters for O2k-2k3 and for OOo. They work, not great, but they work. Oh no! Not on this they don't. The tables are a complete mess and, though I can read the words... making sense of the document is a nightmare. It's rather like a complex scientific journal with all the diagrams thrown away, run through a cheap 1980s OCR program and turned into UNIX ASCII text file without any formatting, only worse. There is formatting, it just doesn't resemble the original formatting of the document in any way shape or form.

I don't want Office 2007, I don't use the copies of Office 97, 2000 or 2003 that I legally own. I much prefer to use Open Office, or Word Perfect Office or anything other than Microsoft Office. I've said it before, I'll say it again, it's not that MS Office is bad, I just don't like it. I know they spend a lot of time and effort on getting their UI right, but I'm happy with WordPad, I'm happy with a DOS command prompt and bash scripts, it's just who I am. I'll spend hours replacing Explorer with little third party desktops, Icon widgets, launch bars and file browsers, I like things to look good, but I need to be able to make them look and act the way I want, not the way your panel of testers say is ergonomically correct for the majority. There is no "I" in democracy, and "I" want "My PC" to work how "I" want, not how the majority vote it should, it's not their PC, they can get their own.

So now I've used Microsoft's Live Writer software to write and upload my winge about their best seller onto their servers, they can shoot me for stealing their software (for about a day), I implemented the 90 day trial of Office 2007 in a virtual machine, read this file and promptly removed it again by going back 1 snapshot. About as legal as I could get away with, and way too much effort just to read a document that is supposed to enable free transfer of information between diverse systems. (it's only not really legal because it's wasn't my copy of the trail, and I because I undid the drive rather than uninstalled, so I could theoretically install it again sometime down the road)

So how Open is Microsoft's Open XML file format? Not very it seems. I can read an ODT file anywhere I can read Google, which is even on a Phoney Praystation! Yet I can't read a docx even on my Microsoft Vista PC with Office 03... and if reports are to be believed, it will be hard to read them on versions of Office yet to come if MS are to implement their own ISO standard format which isn't compatible with the existing docx at all.

Sigh.

Office 2k7 Hate (my hate, you can love it all you like)

While on the MSO chat, and yes I know I was going to bring you W2.0 Spreadsheets next, I will get there I promise, I have to add my tuppenith worth on Clippy and the Ribon. Yea, I hated Mr. Clippit (otherwise known as Clippy the paperclip Office Assistant) though I will miss Paws (the Cat) and Albert (the Genius) more importantly, I miss menus and toolbars. I only wanted to load this file and save it as something I could use... I ended up spending the day loading XP, Office 07 and boxing with a constantly changing blue ribbon... Every time I found an option I wanted to use, I'd move the cursor to where I wanted to apply that tool or effect and... hey! Where'd it go? Everything's changed!

Blue Ribbons should remain fiendishly tasty and reasonably priced chocolate wafer snacks and stay the hell off my PC is all I can say. You want a revolutionary new design? Try putting the toolbars down the sides instead of up the top... have you tried using O2k7 on a widescreen display? Very popular these days... not very practical for word processing, but with OOo I can pin all my toolbars and property pages, document navigation and defined paragraph formats on the sides, maximizing the vertical document editing space, and making practical use of the extra screen width. OOo wins!!! The Office Suite of the future! Hooray!

Okay... so I managed to get O2k7 running in my VM (ugly as it is, at 1024x576 I could get about 3 lines of 8 point text in at page width before the ribbon, and had 3 pixel high text at 80% document view where I could at least see a whole paragraph.), and loaded the docx. Hooray! The page numbers matched the pages, and the tables had columns below them that actually related to the column headers.

So I saved my document out as a .doc, and a .odt, and an rtf, and a PDF and an XPS. "That, I should be able to do something with" I thought, and ditched 2k7 like the shallow painted tart it is.

Getting Something Useful

Reading any of these documents in anything else was quite a trial however. WordPad seemed to do the best job with the Rich Text file. But of course it doesn't support document links, page breaks and a myriad of other features that are actually quite useful in a 278 page document.

The PDF and XPS are fine for reading, but the document was locked from editing or copy and paste. So copying the source code would be a matter of printing and re-typing. That's not very practical either. The .doc file read back about as well as the docx via translation filters, and it turns out (after much re-working of the internals of the file, trying to maintain the layout and feel) that most of what is wrong with it, is that it has been written by someone who has no idea how to use a professional document editing tool like Word. (or rather, it appeared to have been worked on by several someone's, at least one of whom had a very good idea how to manage a large document in a decent word processor, but sadly they weren't in charge of managing the consistency of the document)

The tables, messed up, because they were full of 0 width columns that had been created part way down the table by splitting cells and rather than removing un-necessary columns, they were just shifted along until they met the boundary of the next and / or previous one. Fields had (at some stage) been used to create the page numbers in the contents section, but then they were converted to constants, and links were made to _toc1354375138 named bookmarks which resided at the same point as a decently named and perfectly linkable heading.

I know I've taken word processing courses, and am IT literate enough to get around these things... I know that many of my collogues in programming and system maintenance haven't and or aren't, but surely Microsoft could get a secretarially trained document specialist to collate the information from the techies?

Anyway. I reworked this document in OOo Writer, and in AbiWord and in a little gem known as Jarte (which reads both the .doc and .docx formats as well as .rtf, with the right filters, but sadly goes the way of 2k7 in UI design) and now I have the document in a form that is instantly useable by almost anybody.

One Document to Rule them all...

So, before I upset Microsoft again by republishing their hard work in an edited form, here are some interesting details about this document.

Size (one of the reasons Microsoft cite for the switch to docx):-

Okay... so docx is a lot smaller than a .doc... but not all that much smaller than the zipped .doc, and .docx wont zip because it's already in a .zip file, just like an .odt.

MSOffice makes smaller PDFs, but it used JPEG compression on images even against my wishes, and made a horrible PDF which compressed worse than the originally larger OOo version.

By horrible, I mean the navigation is just every possible link to location in the left hand side with no levels what-so-ever. OOo made a PDF with pull out navigation tree that mimicked the contents of the document.

RTF actually zips quite nicely. I'd say a PDF in a Zip is a pretty good binary distribution form.

XPS files are pretty big, and not so easy to navigate as PDFs. I don't really see what Microsoft is trying to achieve here... other than that it is a plain text XML format in a Zip just like odts and docxs so it doesn't need decompiling to edit the way a PDF does, a simple unzip will do.

The formats which aren't zipped (or compiled binary) already actually pack down smaller than most of the Zipped xml formats... so we're really not saving any space at all, intact, we're loosing it, you can't RAR, ACE or 7ZIP a zip it just doesn't work. (Most modern PDFs should be Flate compressed, the same as a zip, though how thoroughly is up to the creator)

Also of interest, I have discovered that if I unzip a .docx .odt or .xps and pack it back up with ALZip (which isn't the best Zip program by any stretch, but it's cute, small fast and very easy to use) the files become smaller... changing the resultant zips extension back to .docx .odt or .xps makes them still perfectly readable in their new smaller size.

I've tried to get this document to open legibly in as many readily available packages as possible. I've tried Atlantis Nova, Angel Writer, QJot etc etc all of which I consider in some way to be competitors for my up coming WordPad replacement.

Most struggle with the tables. Some, most notably AbiWord, struggle with the sheer size of the document. Jarte reads the whole file, but stops counting the pages when they reach 59, and only saves that many pages.  Angel Writer copes with all the formatting best, but doesn't implement pages or wrap to ruler so you can't really treat it like a mark up for a paper document. WordPad copes the best, but again, page breaks just don't happen as it has no idea what a "page" is till you hit print preview... but at least it knows what the ruler is. The Math functions are very new in Rich Text, and most either ignore them, or turn them into WMF objects inserted into the document. Saving from MSO to an odt file removes them all together, replacing them with the plain text of the variables and little or no math symbols.

The main editing I did is in OOo, my favourite of all. This required considerable effort to take full advantage of the package and it's different (broader ISO standard) Open XML document features.

Open Document Text files implement Math based largely on the older Open XML Math functions of MathML, where Microsoft's Open XML documents are based on their own proprietary markup.

Apparently, Word (prior to 2007) couldn't include math layouts at all. So I'm guessing the Math Markup tool that I used to use in Word 97 was simply embedding a DDE Object. I'm sure I used to do something like this in Lotus AmiPro too back in the 90s, but I know it's something that the LaTeX people have winged and whined about for years, so I guess I'm not all that surprised.

From what I can see, OOos Math injection works out in such a way as you could almost execute it, though you might have to strip a few fluffy formatie bits out here and there that will make no difference to the function of the formula at all, just make it look neater. Microsoft's is much more like laying out a User Interface or a Web Page. It would never run, as code, but the presentation description is quite exact, giving exact measurements in twips and the like. This smells of fluff to me, and doesn't make for a very transportable language at all. Nobody (that I know of) other than Microsoft use a twip as a measurement... and when you're looking at a hard copy document, surely a point or fraction of an inch would be more helpful.

Anyway, what I can agree on is some of the fantastic ways to align formula elements in Microsoft's format. In OOo, the best means of doing this (according to the help) seems to be to align to some edge or other, and pad with one of two relative width white space items, or a phantom object. Microsoft use phantoms too, you can give them no width, or no height but assume their other dimension is the same size as it would be if you included the code / function which it isn't going to display. That doesn't make much sense, but if I have a word "fourtytwo" and I want to line up the word "ant" to one side of it, and the word "dog" to the other but don't want to see the word "fourtytwo" just yet, I can use a phantom of it to measure how long that word would be in the present font and style, and align "ant" and "dog" to that phantom without displaying "fourtytwo".

The Win32 API has a similar function to this in it's repertoire, and when arranging user interface components that appear and disappear as they become relevant (like a ribbon) but must align up regardless of the users preferred font and screen DPI whether they are visible or not (so they don't more around like the ribbon) it is essential to know how long or tall a string will render in a given font at a given DPI without having to draw it just so you can measure it's bounding boxes.

In Math it's more useful to have the brackets from one side of a formula line up with ones on the other side, even though the balance of glyphs within them may vary greatly, so it's clear that you are balancing an equal or equivalent equation, regardless of any variance in glyph ink weight. When you write a mathematical formula, your artists eye automatically does this, (even if you're a mathematician and not an artist) but for a computer, it's not instinctively clear, and since it's logically irrelevant, it can get it seriously wrong.

Regardless, I couldn't find anything listed in the possibilities for 2007 Math Markup that I couldn't do in OOo Writer. Except knowing and setting exactly how many twips might be between one glyph and another. Many things that had different ways to achieve different things in MSO, used different parameters to the same method in OOo, and some needed cheaty work around's like manually shifting the size of individual symbols relative to the whole formula to get the same basic look.

Some features Microsoft considers part of the Math, which OOo treats as object decoration. Boxes around formula, for example. Once a formula is composed in OOo, it is a graphical object on the page, just like a graph or a photo. So just like a graph or a photo it can have a border, and you can control it's justification and it's position relative to the anchor point and the way words and paragraphs wrap to it. Microsoft seems to take a formula as a paragraph, not an object on the page, and so you define it's distance from things, it's alignment and borders within the mathematical paragraph. So maybe all the talk about not having millions of ways to do the same basic thing any more in Office 2007 was all just smoke and mirrors after all. (Don't get upset, I know that's out of context and they were talking about UI design not file formatting and underlying code)

Once I had made the alterations necessary to make the formula work in OOo correctly, and display as they did (plus or minus the odd twip) I had already put considerable effort into making a maintainable odt file. So, I went ahead and saved the source for the example RFT reader to a folder and zipped it up, applied a common font to the code (because it was irregular and all over the place from various edits) and took the liberty of applying standard schintilla syntax highlighting to it. I know most of this won't print, but it makes it easier to read on screen. I re-aligned some of the comments here and there too.

Between fixing the empty half columns and broken tables, messing with formula and this that and the other the page numbers were now skewed, and as I say the TOC was no longer linked to page numbers via functions (though you can see it was at some time) so I re-built the Contents page using OOos locked contents object, and configured it to maintain the same formatting as Microsoft had used.

Sharing the Fruits of my Labours

Then I moved on to creating a clean PDF from all this. I had the one Word created, and hotlinks did work, but as I say, the side index (or bookmarks) it exported where a complete mess, the XPS doesn't even seem to maintain a document navigator. The file size of my new PDF was quite a bit bigger, but I know that OOo creates complete and clean PDFs not optimized for downloading, so I ran it through a compressor, and was amazed at the difference, the document even loaded in a flash compared even to the MS export and had it's beautiful TOC at the side, so I tried the compressor on the MS document (which I will keep as a reference to the original formatting of the document). The result was less impressive, but that may be because Jpegs don't re-compress as well as lossless images. Even so, the time taken to load is a great improvement, and the size decrease is not inconsiderable.

I'm not sure if you can do this with XPS files, but a PDF can have other files attached to it, just like an Email can. I wanted to use this to attach the zip I made of the example source file, so I attached the zip to the page where the source code starts with another little PDF tool I downloaded.

Now, you can have the choice of reading this document in two flavors of PDF, (I recommend my OOo reconditioned version, unless you are a stickler for authenticity) as an XPS or a Rich Text file, and the PDFs will have a zip containing all the source and a make file for building your very own Rich Text Format file reader.

Links to these files in my public Sky Drive can be found here, and will remain here until Microsoft take them down, or ask me to do so for them. Personally, I hope they don't take offense to my redistribution... In fact, they can give me a job. ;)    PS. The Zip contains the Rich Text export from Word 2007.

Okay... I know I've gotten other posts to put up but I had to comment on this while it's fresh.

Microsoft have bid $44.6bn to take over Yahoo from it's share holders this Friday and it's all over the news.

Their proposed aim in this take-over? "Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners" Everyone is pointing to the "dominated by one player" part as being a reference to Googles recent acquisitions of DoubleClick and the Googlesyndication advertising ring, AdSense and AdWords Google Analytics... which actually benefits Googles search database as well... hence why a Google search is far more relevant than a Yahoo one in most cases.

TBH, I was a big Excite fan... I flowed easily to AltaVista, but haven't used them over Google in some considerable time... largely because they now use the Yahoo engine and database... why Yahoo still keep the AltaVista page I'm not entirely sure. I used to use AllTheWeb... but in all honesty, their database has become seriously out-of-date, and the specific FTP and Gopher searches are no longer available in the usable way they used to be. So Google is in-deed the only real player in the Search engine field. Microsoft's Live! search out strips a Yahoo search (IMHO) and their HotBot is nearly as good as a DogPile search. So what do they think Yahoo will gain them over Google?

Let's look at the three companies side by side, to see what they offer:-

Yup... I used a Google Sheet. Well, I still don't even have the Beta of Office Live! I am promised... so...

So... from this we can see that Microsoft would gain only 6 points in competition with Google. They could also gain 10 services that they don't currently have, and neither do Google. However, we could potentially loose 34 services from Yahoo, which Microsoft already have.

Looking more closely, Microsoft has always been keen to leave Avatars to others... so I think they will just kill that if they take over Yahoo. I don't really see why they'd want Yahoo Notes, unless they want to expand Live! Lists. Advanced searches are not really in their interest, as narrowing your search criteria narrows their ability to throw marketing at you, and on that point, Microsoft are not very good at marketing anyone but Microsoft. I don't think they will pick up all the companies who currently place Ads with Yahoo, because they probably go to Yahoo because they are Microsoft and / or Google competitors. Microsoft's Live! search technology, while no Google or Spotlight, is as good, if not better than Yahoos' engine so they can't want that, and we should also remember that we will be loosing AltaVista as well as Yahoo.

If we loose Yahoo, we loose Yahoo Widgets, (formally Konfabulator) which spawned Apples Dashboard Widgets... and for what? That code can't be re-used in Vista Side Bar or Live! Gadgets. It's Java not .NET / Avalon / WPF.

If Microsoft want any of that lot... It's probably Yahoos mobile technology (but IMHO their market placing would kill it, even it they had it) and Bable Fish. There was a time when Bable Fish was a huge asset on the Web... now it has many competitors, and some are based on considerably better (faster and more accurate) engines than Bable.

I can't see MS carrying on with GeoCities, and Bill Gates recent philanthropy aside, if MS wanted a Microsoft for Good they could do it without buying Yahoo.

No... I don't think this is about increasing consumer quality and choice. I don't think it's about Microsoft beating Google, or even Google beating Microsoft. It's about Microsoft kicking Yahoo while they are down. It's about one less competitor for Microsoft.

Oddly enough... I think it could well become more about one less competitor for Google, which will place Google in an even better position to make Microsoft's strangle hold on PCs irrelevant.

If Microsoft wanted to go up against Google, they should start selling Microsoft Linux, buy out ThinkFree Office, SlideShare and or Wordsmith. They should stop working on Silverlight and concentrate on technologies closer to AJAX and XUL, which can operate across multiple platforms.

I know Microsoft have this mind set, that if it's not Windows only it needs to be bought out, and versions for other platforms killed off, or just stamped on till it dies, but the Web is changing how we look at applications. It really won't matter if you're using a Windows, Linux, Apple, BSD, Sun, X-Box or Playstation to use your applications... just so long as they can get on line and run Web 2.0 XHTML, AJAX, Java, JavaScript and Flash.

MS Office will not stand up to that, unless it steps up to it. Windows will not last in it's present incarnations... not even Vista. Linux' Wine and ReactOS are already more compatible with legacy Win32 applications than 64-bit versions of Windows. In Wines case, even on 64 bit versions of Linux or BSD. .NET is an arse when compared with present Sun offerings and delight the Mono Open Source cross platform equivalents, it's just doesn't port as easily or as well. WPF and IE7 are too little too late.

Yes, I use Windows XP. I own Vista, but I don't use it. I don't see the point in using it, as opposed to SUSE, PC-BSD or MacOS. If I had the cash or I could freely run it on any hardware, I'd use MacOS. I can run both Wine and Windows XP proper, and get all the benefits of true Unix and Mac only applications. Oh yea, and IEEE1394 works properly with ease without having to boot the thing and keep winding tapes back and forth and rebooting the computer just to remove a drive with a filesystem that isn't 30 years old. If I wanted the best value for money modern OS I would probably use Ubuntu or PC-BSD.

The stand-alone Desktop PC is becoming as irrelevant as the Mainframe computer, at which point, your choice of OS, and your choice of browser becomes just that... your choice. It makes little or no difference, in the long run, with your use of the computer / terminal. The applications you use, the things you do, games you play etc will all have to be on-line services designed to fit any box (with sufficient processing power and audio visual capabilities and user input) you care to connect with.

Even after the beating Sun took from Microsoft over the Java court cases, I think Sun (especially after their recent acquisition of mySQL, and the prolific use of OpenOffice on any non-Windows platform) and Google with their cross-platform in-browser technology and well known brand are far better suited to be a threat to MS than Yahoo, who are simply a service provide lightening the Microsoft server and competition load. To kill off (buy out) Yahoo is somewhat political suicide IMHO. It gains them little and looses them a fair chunk of a market they need to move to, if they are to continue their success story.

I wouldn't normally mind the idea of Microsoft going down the swanny, but taking user choices for the future with them is offensive to me in the extreme. And in all honesty... this new emerging market they need to move to, is one I think they are well positioned to server users well in. One I would like to see them succeed at, but one which I think they are going about entirely the wrong way.

I can only urge Yahoo shareholders not to take this offer. For the sake of Yahoo, the sake of Microsoft, and the sake of the Internet community. I also urge users of the Internet to take up in Yahoos defense, should they defy the man from MS publicly.

Okay. Rant over. Please feel free to comment.

Introducing Web 2.0

Okay... today I'm going to blog about On-Line Web Based Productivity applications.

The buzzword is "Web 2.0" which makes it sound like it's some new standard to replace the existing World Wide Web with something new, the Web evolved or something. It's not that at all, well not really. While Web 2.0 is an evolution in Web technology, it's one that has been happening for the past 10-20 years or so, so there's no need to panic and update your browser or contact your ISP about upgrading to Web 2.0... If you do they will probably either laugh at you, or bill you more for the same service.

What makes a web site "Web 2.0" is kind-of grey and fuzzy, the fact is that there are a number of technologies which have been making web pages far more interactive than the original W3C standard alone allows for. Things like Adobes' (formerly Macromedia) Flash, Suns Java, JavaScript, Active Server Pages and other CGI scripting technologies using Perl, PHP and back end databases typically using SQL... added with the specification of W3C standard CSS to create DHTML or Dynamic HTML. Some reasonably bright bods have managed to make these technologies work together in a manner which means that web pages can be as fast and productive as any application on your desktop.

The challenge, up until recently, has been to get each of those parts working together dynamically enough to be effective from the users point of view, without being so restrictive that the user interface is limited to a point where it is difficult for users to transition from working off-line to working on-line.

As I say... this internet integration with the desktop experience has been going on for a long time. Microsoft introduced Active Desktop with IE 4 back on Windows 95 along with the Channel Bar. (Two "features" I hated with a vengeance... but then I had only got 56k dial-up) Yahoo Widgets (formally Konfabulator) and many other desktop Weblets have existed improving this somewhat failed idea, but the timing seems to be right... I believe much of it is about availability of broadband internet and the reduced frustration with slowly downloading pages that cost 45p a minuet, and as web consumers we are all getting much happier about Automatic Updates, XML RSS News Feeds on our desktop and regularly updated Podcasts and instant messaging. There is also a tendency to think of the internet as the World Wide Web. The idea that if it's anything to do with the internet I must have to click the Big Blue E on my desktop or the Compass on my Dock (I'm sorry, but Linux users typically have a more cultured view of internet use) is common place. While we still like to use a separate eMail client, even that is quite commonly done in a web browser when we're not in the office.

Corporate astonishment at employees desire to use the office bandwidth for instant messaging where they wouldn't dream of making personal calls without getting permission has lead to web based access to instant messaging becoming common place, (Thus bypassing the corporate firewalls port blocks on common IM protocols) and so, about the only thing we use a program other than our web browser to access the net is high performance video games and Peer2Peer file sharing. Incidentally, the Phosphor project demonstrates how "high performance" this Browser platform can be, even for video games.

But if instant messaging can operate fast enough, with a presentable enough user interface that people can hold fluent conversations... why can't we do our Word Processing and Spreadsheets in a web page?

Well, the short answer is that you can... and with the current cost of Microsoft Office, and the incompatibility issues with their Works suite, when your out of the workplace, and have access to the internet, you certainly might just as well. (YMMV, but I feel that a home office suite compatible with the workplace should not cost more than about £60 absolute tops. I think Microsoft Office is worth about £25, and definitely not more than a PS3 / X360 Game considering the effort and usefulness of each)

Oh no, Another Anti-Microsoft Rant

Okay... quick pointer about bias. I do, and have always hated Microsofts' Office Suite. It's popularity is (IMHO) purely because it's files have become "a standard" and so it's use has become "a standard". I accept that for many people it is the only tool they know to do the job, and it's far easier to do a job with a tool you know. Presently, although I know that Microsoft have put a lot of effort into improving it's Office product range, I strongly believe that they are asking to high a price for a collection of (while graphically very attractive, in their latest 2007 incarnation) awkward and clumsy tools with proprietary file standards which only became standard in the first place because it came "free" with every new computer purchased.

It's not that it's really really bad software. It's just that it really isn't worth the price they are asking... even in the OEM or Volume Licensing schemes. Especially not when there are cheep to free alternatives like the 602 Suite, OpenOffice, KOffice (soon to be released for Windows and Mac as well as Linux) or combinations like Gnumeric and AbiWord, and I've never felt that it was up to the standard of Lotus SmarSuite or Corel WordPerfect Office Suite, which retail at similarly high prices. So, it's neither cheep nor good, but merely average quality, expensive software. (IMHO)

It's not my place to tell people where to buy their software and I don't hate Microsoft so much I avoid all their products simply because they are Microsoft products. Notice, I'm blogging on a Microsoft Live Space!? There are Microsoft products use and pay for and feel I have got a good deal. I am, however aware that Microsoft has a brand name equivalent to the vast dominance of the total software sales, and that that brand awareness can both carry a price tag, and stifle awareness and therefore take-up of many, arguably more competitive alternatives. What I do feel it is my place to do, as one with an eye on the ground in these areas, is to inform others of the availability of such... and point out the pros and cons of each choice they may make.

The On-Line Office Alternative

Okay, back to the point. What are the options for working your office productivity life without software? And more to the point, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Well, I've already mentioned Microsofts' 2007 edition of Office, and if you're still using an older version there are some features of the new line up which you should probably be aware of, as you make your decision to upgrade or wait. I've personally found alternate versions of Office to be more acceptable than the next, 2000 is my favorite of all time, XP defaulted completely back to front, looked goofy and had more nag screens than most unregistered shareware, 2003 is much better, 2007 looks remarkably like a low cost budget Office suite and seems (to my eyes) to insist that the user go back to the start of their learning curve... and, as previously stated, pay through the nose for the privilege. Then again, I also said it has some new features and that Microsoft have worked hard to make improvements.

So what are they, and what does this have to do with On-Line Web 2.0 productivity suites? Well, firstly that "standard" office file format has been kind-of thrown to the wind, for a start off. Office 2007 now works on a more open standard XML file format for all it's files, and your file names will have a new "X" appended to the extension (if you show extensions for common file types) to indicate this. XML is of course a Web standard. It places database style information in a plain text file which can easily be transmitted across systems with varying Operating Systems, Time Zones and language configurations without loss or corruption. That brings us to the second part of the question, what does Office 2007 have to do with Web 2.0 Productivity Suites. Well, though Office isn't a MS Product I beta, I am on the beta users lists at Microsoft and get a lot of info on what is going on, and what they are planning. Office 2007 was originally slated to be an on-line only application.

The original idea (as I understood it) was to have a small program which users downloaded, which gave them access to all their documents on-line. The user would no longer be able to save to "My Documents" or eMail their work, and would then be able to get to their documents from any machine which had the new Office installed on it. They would not pay for the download, which would be a constantly maintained package on their system, updated regularly and automatically from the net. Instead they would have to pay a rental fee on their on-line Office space.

The arguments then came back "What about my accounts Spreadsheets? I don't want Microsoft to have access to those?", "How do I share sensitive files with my work collogues and not the rest of the world?", "What about backup? If Microsoft loose my data will I have to sue them?" and the whole idea was put back for a re-think. It's still on the boards though, and you can sign up for a Beta test of Microsofts' Office Live Workspace... I have, and will review it here when it's open, but you have to pre-register to get in.

I Want it Now Now Now!

Of course you do, and others, possibly with less to lose, possibly with more forethought and defiantly with more to gain have already got on-line productivity suites available for your Web 2.0 machine.

I'm going to review 3 packages which (while all still claiming to be Beta) are fairly mature, and usable for a variety of purposes, and mentioning a couple of less critical or less complete applications along the way. The systems I've found most useful are Zoho, ThinkFree Office and Google Docs...? Google? Oh my goodness, they really do have their fingers in every pie now don't they? It's been said before that Google is the new Microsoft, just as Microsoft was the new IBM... This may be true, but I won't bias against Google any more than I bias against MS. With any of these large corporations it is always worth remembering how much you let them know about you... especially where your business and accountancy is concerned.

There are other systems out there, especially if you have a Web Server with Server Side Scripting on which you are prepared (or may even prefer) to host such services yourself. Remember, if you own the server, you are the only one who controls who can see what's on it.

Reviews

I tried all parts of each set of applications, on as many current browsers as I could. I shall review each application by the type of document it handles, though the variety of applications by each provider differs somewhat. I've noted file compatibility, document sharing and collaboration features, and the quality of document translation as fully as I can, in a real-world context.

The browsers I had available to me, and tested were IE7 (Version 7.0.5730.11), Safari 3.0.3(522.15.5), Firefox 2 (Version 2.0.0.8), Maxton 2 (Version 2.0.4.5799) and Avant (11.5 Build 21).

Documents

All three services provide a document service, and ThinkFree actually offer two.

Google

Google Documents is the lightest of the three. The options for formatting are limited but more than adequate. The user interface is clean and simple, and operation is very fast, even on a very modest system. It's also the most heavily web based system... and tested very well on all the browsers I tried. The features it dose support are far superior to WordPad, Write, or Apples TextEdit application, and far superior to the Word Processors I remember back in the days of DOS. It's closer to the original Word for Windows or Works for Windows, Claris Works on Classic Macs etc.

You won't see features like Mail Merge, Forms based templates or WordArt. On the other hand, it can produce far better html output than Word. Of course it does... your looking at it in your web browser aren't you?

The available fonts are limited to commonly accepted fonts for Web Pages, but then, how many fonts do you really need? We don't seem to notice the limited number of fonts on the Web, and every letter I receive in the post seems to use some form of Helvetica clone (Lucida Grande / Arial) type font, or a Times (Times New Roman / Garamon / Baskerville) type font... Deco fonts are rare outside publishing houses and the classroom, since they just aren't pleasant on the eyes.

Clipart, photos, graphs, charts and editable tables are all highly doable, and word wrapping options are complete with no problems. Having said that, you would have to have Table formatting, since there is no tab bar, and no indication of the margins of the page. Words wrap around the paragraph like a web page, and are only fixed to the margins when you choose to print. It's also, only at the print stage that you get to choose between European and US paper sizes.

Print quality is fairly reasonable. However, with the variable page size, I have had images end up overlapping tables when you come to print out. Of course you can always save a PDF and print that instead. This is a good call if you are not sure of the print quality or availability of your web browser.

  Speaking of which, the export options are well rounded. Word Documents, Portable Documents (Largely read only, but available on any system), OpenOffice Documents ("Open Document Text", the Industry agreed standard XML based document, supported by just about everything EXCEPT Microsoft Office), RTF Rich Text (the older standard cross-platform editable formatted text format), Plain ASCII Text and HyperText Markup are all available for export and most for import. If you can find a Word Processor or Text Editor that can't support one of these formats, you are a better software hunter than I... then again, why would you want it?

Working with the system is a breeze, once you get over the initial learning curve. Right clicking context menus and such are pretty much like any generic word processor. The Tabbed interface is actually really nice for switching the context of the toolbar, and economic on screen real estate. Sending a Google Doc via eMail sends an HTML eMail which is infinitely more accessible to everyone than an attached Word Document. If print formatting is a concern, I'd advise attaching a PDF rather than the Word format, especially as this will resolve any font issues, unless you really want the person receiving it to edit it and send it back. That practice, however, should become a thing of antiquity if Web 2.0 Apps take off as they should, since you can simply provide a collaboration link in the eMail and then they can edit it on-line, from your space.

The Revisions tab also adds a feature not commonly found on desktop PCs at present. Should you find, for any reason that you want to go back to an earlier version of the document, you can do so quite simply with this feature. I often see people with backups of older versions of their documents, frequently because they haven't gotten around to creating a template and working up new documents from that, but then, if the feature isn't used... there must be something wrong with it? Right? It may be that it simply isn't publicised well enough in the application, or that us techie types who end up doing most of the training have no need for it, and neglect to pass the details on to the office admins for whom it is a real time saver. In any case... Revisions is not so advanced an idea, but infinitely easier to manage, and, in Google Docs at least, very clearly visible feature.

Just so you know, this feature is now premiering on the new Mac OS X 10.4 Leopard OS released this month where it is available for any file produced in any application on the PC. I haven't Betaed Leopard so I really can't say much about how it works there, but the concept was familiar to me from Google Docs & Spreadsheets. There are High End or Experimental Linux/Unix Filesystems with this capability, essentially trying to get around the Hot-Desking "Trash Can" vs. restoring from a Tape Backup problem. Again, this solution is not as simple as Googles.

Google Docs is also available on mobile phones and PDAs...

ThinkFree Office

ThinkFree is the opposite in most respects, both in regard to Documents and every other form of file. Their whole premise is to make you think you have MS Office in a Web Page. The colour of the toolbars here is grey only because that's how my desktop theme is, and how it know's what theme I'm using, I couldn't say. The look is almost identical to Office 2003, the feel is the same, and the features are not far short.

A page is a page in ThinkFree, Documents are Word Documents, and the Tab bar is fully functional, as this rather complex document clearly shows... Actually, compared to the original OpenOffice document I formatted up from the ReadMe.txt file that came with SYSLINUX, there are some minor line spacing issues... but OpenOffice isn't MS Office is it?

ThinkFree produces excellent PDF output too, and considering the number of PDF writer plugins sold for use in Office, and the number of free and commercial PDF Printer simulations, this is probably quite a big factor in ThinkFrees' favor. Of course the same goes for the other offerings, but none of them are quite as completely Office like as ThinkFree.

The biggest let down of ThinkFree is the import & export formats. The image illustration is from the Premium Desktop version (more on that later) and yet still, aside from the PDF, Rich Text and HTML formats, the only availability is Word, and some formats which are hardly appropriate for this kind of file.

SVG files are similar to uncompressed PDF files, a rather less branded version of Adobes PostScript or the Macromedia (now also Adobe) Flash files. XML is a very standard format, but without formatting as MS or OpenDocument there is no context to make sense of an XML file as a word processed document. Plain Text is as Plain Text does. It's unformatted, and quite honestly, you don't need a word processor for that.

On the plus side of this, it does support both traditional Word (97-2000) format files and the new Word 2007 DocX files, and as a free converter it scores over the Microsoft filter in being bi-directional and installation free.

All the fonts on the system you are working on are available in ThinkFree, just as they are in Word. However, in terms of collaboration, this could be a negative, unless you can guarantee that all collaborators have access to the fonts you are using and will stick rigidly to those fonts in any edits they make.

The other big let down is the speed and responsiveness. The illustration to the right is one of 3 to 5 which attempt to keep you amused as the system gets going. Although it is supposedly cached, that assumes that you (or someone else) uses the same machine to access ThinkFree regularly, and as open access machines keep caches for different users in different places, and often clear them at log off anyway, I don't find this assurance very comforting. The mention of Network Speed is not very reassuring either, I use a 20Meg/sec connection at home, and the initial start up was like waiting for YouTube to start on 56K Dial-up. Successive openings were about 1/3 or the time, but that's still quite long enough to get the gist of the splash pages.

On the other hand ThinkFree Premium Desktop allows you to keep the application on your computer (for free) and work on documents off-line, and upload them to your 1GB ThinkFree space when you choose to go (on-line) work on them away from home or the office, and re-sync your TFP space with your TFO space later on.

If you're worried about syncing up your office Mac with your home Windows/Linux box or Laptop, fret no longer, as TFOffice Premium is a Java Application and will run on any system with the Sun Java VM Framework installed and up to date, and is available in an OS X package, a Windows Setup.exe and a Linux shell install.

I haven't attempted to make any of these work on my PC-BSD box yet, but either Wine or a BSD BASH shell script should cope with this task admirably. The on-line, in your browser version, of course will work on absolutely any OS, and I see no reason why QNX or BeOS (or derivatives) couldn't run it just as well, provided you can get a current version of Java installed. If you know differently please let me know, as this is actually an important consideration here. The requirements Google Docs & Spreadsheets places on the browser are much less stringent, but we should also consider that most mobile phones can run Java applications to some extent.

The GB spelling checker is very good, and that also important for this implementation, as browser based based spelling plugins (which I commonly use in both IE and Firefox) will not pick up spelling errors inside the Java application.

It's my feeling that ThinkFree is targeted at a slightly different audience than Google. Where Google are going for the user who has the occasional need to draft something up before going to work, or people who have a need to perform collaborative documentation across organisations with vastly different IT infrastructures, ThinkFree is definitely targeting people who like Office, but don't like the amount of hard disk space, compatibility issues, system slowdown on occasional use, and high purchase price of that package. The TCO (total cost of ownership) that Microsoft frequently sight as one of their server systems greatest benefits (and I think that is a fair claim) are clearly not followed through with their productivity suite. If they don't wise up, I can see this as a positive alternative for many users.

Zoho

Zoho Writer sits nicely in between the two alternatives. There are a wide selection of tools, the layout is much more like a word processing application than a web page, and yet the application clearly is running in the browser without any VM Applet layer. Nothing is installed on a regular system, and response is good.

Zoho Writer imports and exports all the regular standard formats of word processed document, though it lacks the Word 2007 DOCX format which allows ThinkFree to act as an effective converter between Word 97-2003 and the newer 2007 form. It does still list the older Sun Star Office format over Google, but current versions of Star Office should also support the Open Document format, since Star Office is only a commercial version of OpenOffice.

Many of the people who worked on the Open Document standard have contributed heavily to that Open Source project, leading to Open Document files being the standard for OpenOffice.

That said, if you are interested in obtaining the commercial Star Office from Sun, over the freeware open source OpenOffice, but would rather not pay the $69.95 (at time of writing) that Sun are asking for a direct sale, Google are offering version 8 (the current version, again at time of writing) as part of the Google Pack. Their asking price is nothing, and they assure that this is no trial, and not sponsored. However, I couldn't say that I would expect the support line offered by Sun to be extended to Google Pack sub-licensees. OpenOffice has a very active User Support forum on-line, so the only reason I can see for wanting to use Star Office, is that technical support help line, but I imagine Google would support their sub-licence just as they do the other Pack programs.

My biggest quibble with Zoho is that, like Google, it doesn't support tab points properly. There is a tab bar in Zoho, so there must be some intention for this feature, and Tabs do work, provided you don't want anything other than standard 1" left aligned Tabs.

Again, with my formatted SysLinux document you can see that the Light Blue code section headings should be aligned left, with the areas of the script that this element is applicable to, aligned hard to the right margin. That, doesn't happen. The rendering of the boxed out sections is pretty good, though none of the products managed the shadow I assigned in my desktop word processor.

Zoho have a nice plugins for Firefox and IE6+ called QuickRead which allow you to view common office documents you might find laying around the Web, inside your browser window without starting another application. They also provide a special version formatted for use on your Apple iPhone called iZoho... I imagine this would work well on PDAs other Smart Phones and even devices like iPod Touch or Sony PSP. And they have a plugin for Microsoft Office, meaning you can move gradually to on-line working, and retain the speed and efficiency of your office environment while accessing your files on the go in a lower performance environment.

There are code inserts for Blogs and FaceBooks, space to upload files to instead of attaching them to eMails and a whole slew of other document sharing and conversion tools and APIs available, and server systems for corporate users who wish to brand Zoho products and provide the service to their employees themselves as part of their corporate business strategy.

All in, I have to say, I think Zoho have a lot to offer and deserve to succeed in a big way... if they don't I it will only be through poor marketing.

Word Processing Summery

You can check out the original print formatting of that SysLinux Document on my Public SkyDrive with the link below.

It was produced in OpenOffice from a plain text file.

Features

Next Time

Okay... I've delayed this as much as I can, and it's already a huge post. Personal stuff has come up that I need to sort out, but I plan to release the next post about on-line Spreadsheets, then Presentation, then Databases and other tools.

So I'll see you all next time.

Aside Note: Please note that I prefer to Link than Cite. You can verify my comments or statements, many of which are my own personal opinion and many are contested / contestable. There are those that agree and those who don't. My links are intended to give you a starting point in understanding where my views and information come from, and decide if you agree with them or think I'm talking a load of rubbish. Additional research may be required of the reader, if they're knowledge contradicts my teachings here in... or if you just don't trust me. I try to be as open and un-opinionated as I can, but I am but one, unedited man.