@whitequark has LibreOffice gotten any better recently? god it was awful the last time I tried to use it, and I'll never forget the time one of my students who (with good intentions) moved some of our documents over to it and they were so irrevocably fucked afterwards that we just discarded all of the work he had done

@regehr you'd have to be more specific for me to give you an answer, like what was awful?

@whitequark it just didn't really seem to work, had trouble with basic document formatting and saving and loading and stuff. was a few years ago

@regehr @whitequark I similarly found Write to fall short on basic "being a word processor" tasks like reliably formatting & loading/saving when I last used it 4 or 5 years back. Calc seemed less janky at the time.

@gsuberland @regehr @whitequark The file compatibility stuff is really hard; while the MS files XML is publicly specified, it's not very well specified, and there are multiple different embedded formats within those - which may or not be compatible even between MS products. I've fixed a few LO bugs now; last october I did a particularly funny Powerpoint numbered-lists import bug that showed incorrect death stats for a motorbiking club (most were not from biking :-) )

@penguin42 @regehr @whitequark yup. I used to work on this stuff at an old job, around 2012. the OpenXML spec tells you how the documents are structured, but doesn't tell you about special behaviours for specific IDs and indices that are de-facto reserved by MS Office. but that's not really an excuse for how bad it is when it comes to text going off page and tables being broken, cos I got both of those working myself in about 2 days as one of my first Office interop tasks back then.