Switching from one to another; Updated

Hmmm; – well that seemed to work …

I’ve got to confess, I’ve a little frustrated with NeoOffice, just recently, having discovered that it doesn’t seemingly support some of the common OS X shortcuts I’ve learned to value.   Most of them are in there, I should add; – ⌘ + N opens a new file, ⌘ + Q quits the programme quits it.

But one that got me slightly annoyed wasn’t; – the simple inability of NeoOffice to let me use 

the alt key, with the cursor keys, to navigate, or delete whole words at a time.   Something OpenOffice does, with ease.

Which had me frustrated as NeoOffice was the open source office suite of choice, for Mac users, for many years.

Mostly because OpenOffice had to work through Mac OS X’s X11 windowing system; – something OS X uses to run software originally designed for Linux, or Windoze based operating systems.

Which made OpenOffice 2.x and earlier somewhat clunky to use.   And a bit too Windoze like for my taste.   Combine that with an apparent lack of support for British English a bit of a non starter, for me.

And made NeoOffice mostly a joy to use; – and the alt + cursor key problem only a relatively minor issue.

Until just recently, though.   Being able to use that key combo, in Safari, whilst writing this blog, and in other pieces of Mac software means not using it in NeoOffice was getting more frustrating.

OpenOffice 3.0.x and later seems to be a definite improvement.

However, NeoOffice have always claimed to be a touch faster; – On the basis of the few days use I’ve had of OpenOffice, that’s justified.   I’ll keep using OpenOffice, but I’ll add some more, when NeoOffice 3.0 is released.

For starters, the OpenOffice community, along with Sun Microsystems, who make the commercial version, have managed – for the Leopard version of OpenOffice 3.0.x –have managed to get it to work directly from OS X, without having to go through X11.   And there’s a cross platform extension, allowing one to use British English.

I’m also grateful that both bits of software are open source; – which allowed me to find a work-round.   You may remember, I wrote about open source software in January, but to summarise; it’s free software, you’re allowed to give copies to people, and more to the point, you can makes changes to it, yourself.

Which is what I did, to get around the one problem I had with OpenOffice; the fact I couldn’t access my trusty Mac Mini’s on-board fonts.

Which was actually fairly simple to solve.   All I had to do was add alias of the fonts I wanted OpenOffice to recognise to the folder called OpenOffice>Contents>Basis-Link>Share>Fonts>Truetype.   Which seems to be working, so far.

I’ll probably write more about this as and when, but I’ll leave it there for now.   But I’ll add the various links, throughout this post.

But I’m feeling rather good about being able to tweak stuff, meself.

See you Thursday, folks!