ONLYOFFICE or Libre: about the battle of formats and co-editing
This day has come: we have opened the source code for ONLYOFFICE desktop editors. Now they are completely free for home and commercial use. License AGPLv3, download site , code on GitHub .
And in this article, we simply give several arguments in favor of refusing to use ONLYOFFICE, rather than Libre, for economic or ideological reasons, if Microsoft Office is abandoned. Read on to experience pain.
You probably expect that now we will be measured by functionality and argue with foaming at the mouth, from whom it is better implemented. Nah Of course, you can find what we have implemented better, and what has been done better with them. Something we did not finish, somewhere they have bugs. And in general, all this is very subjective. Let's take a closer look at the factual side of the matter.
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Shortest history of formats
Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, the main document formats were binary. And they called them doc, xls and ppt. The world of documents already rules MicrosoftEmpire . But brave rebels of OpenOffice appeared who wanted to free the galaxy from the yoke of the Empire and create their own document editors.
The difficulty was that the Microsoft formats were closed, and the knowledge of their secrets could only be prohibited by the Jedi code by reverse engineering. And the braverebels of OpenOffice made their open XML-based format and called it ODF (odt, ods, odp). They did very well! This was understood even by the representatives of the empire, who simply took advantage of the idea of ​​resourceful rebels and in 2007 released a new version of their office, which kept documents in the new format - OOXML (docx, xlsx and pptx, which are painfully familiar to us). And then what happened: Microsoft had more resources and programmers and they just made their format better - improving and expanding it. By the way, the old binary Microsoft formats were also discovered, removing the veil of secrecy so that developers who did not have enough midi-chlorians could also legally use them.
It must be said that the seemingly related formats ODF and OOXML turned out to be completely incompatible with each other. In one there are objects that are not in the other, and in the second there are such properties that are not in the first. In general, in order to overtake one into another with a simple XSLT transformation, you will not manage.
Almost all documents are stored in doc or docx
And now we will return from history to the present moment and realize this: almost 99% of all text documents in the studied part of the galaxy are stored in doc or docx formats. Moreover, most of them are in docx, because since 2007 every new document created by MS editors is saved to it by default. The doc stores mostly old documents. (And by the way, for old versions of Word in Microsoft, they wrote down a plug-in that allows you to save documents in docx. Their goal is to completely get away from the old format). At the same time, text documents in odt format in the world are just over one percent.
You can say: you took these numbers from the ceiling (no, this is not so, we did a lot of analytical work before we began to write our editors). Perhaps someone will try to prove that the ratio is 90 to 10. But this does not change the essence, since it is not 50 to 50 or even not 60 to 40. Otherwise, Libre Office (as heirs of Open Office) would already rule the world on a par with Microsoft . And Microsoft really rules: after all, in the docx format, not just most of the documents, but ALMOST ALL documents on the planet.
When we chose which of the open formats — ODF or OOXML — to do as the main one, we had little doubt. We wanted to correctly open and work with most of the documents, and not with a smaller one .
When we display a document, we essentially display a set of objects — a particular object model. In LibreOffice, the document object model corresponds to the ODF format created by Open Office programmers, in our case the object model fully conforms to the OOXML format created by Microsoft. Therefore, we open docx files better than Libre, and odt files do worse. But docx files are much larger. Thus, we better open most of the text documents existing on the planet.
(Note: we don’t say now that Libre Office is worse. Their format is objectively more rare, therefore there will be much more problems and difficulties with compatibility)
And what about the odt?
Of course, we work with this format. How to support it when our main format is incompatible with it docx? Option two: either develop a separate editor (expensive and costly), or convert. We chose the option with conversion: when you try to open odt in ONLYOFFICE editor, odt will automatically convert to docx. Unfortunately, some conversion losses are very likely, although we, of course, strive to reduce losses to a minimum.
You can save the edited file back to odt. A scheme with two conversions will turn out: odt - docx - odt. Here we must take into account that if the conversion is hay passed through a horse, then double conversion is hay passed through a horse twice.
What we want to say this part of the article: we had to sacrifice the quality of the opening odt. However, we believe that the loss of quality in 1% of cases is much less significant than the loss of quality in 99% of cases. If you understand where we're going.
The world is moving into the clouds, and working together on documents for many is not just a nice bonus, but a vital necessity. Libre Office is also working on an online version of the editors (Collabora Office).
How does the online editor Libre (no)
The developers have chosen a scheme in which the desktop editor rotates on the server, and the end-user in the browser transmits a picture of what is happening in the cloud. The actions of the user himself are transmitted to the server, the changes are processed by the editor, after which a new picture is sent to the user. Thus, the developers decided not to develop an online editor, but simply to put their finished desktop into the cloud and debug the translation mechanism.
This approach has pros and cons. Plus: with such a scheme all the functions that are in the desktop Libre will be available online. Minus: so that a large number of users can work in such an online editor, you will have to raise REALLY MANY servers. Something tells us that it will be expensive and very slow.
In addition, Libre does not currently have co-editing. At all. And since their online editor is a desktop placed in the cloud, in order to do at least some kind of work together someone will have to climb into its core (more precisely, into the code of three different desktop editors, which were also written by different teams) and produce significant changes, because all the mega-functionality of the editors should be available in collaboration. In other words, three editors will have to be refactored. As you understand, rewriting the code of the editors and making the relay mechanism are rather far from each other tasks. In general, our forecast is that the joint editing of LibreOffice will not be for a long time. But all the functions of the desktop will be.
Desktop ONLYOFFICE is a browser
We believe that we are more fortunate in this regard: we first wrote an online editor, and then redid it into the desktop. Let's say that we have co-editing by default, since the ONLYOFFICE desktop is essentially a browser that does not open all pages, but only ours - documents. To do this, we use the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), more about this can be found in our article on the anatomy of desktop editors.
Of the other advantages - we believe that our editors are editors of the “future”, they will work on everything that supports HTML, be it a new Chinese operating system or an alien technology with access to the terrestrial Internet (we assume that aliens are all they will decide to set up the Internet for themselves in order to better study our civilization).
(Very) Conclusions
If suddenly you could not read many letters above, here we briefly formulate the main differences between open source ONLYOFFICE editors and the Office Libre Office suite:
In general, you decide.
And in this article, we simply give several arguments in favor of refusing to use ONLYOFFICE, rather than Libre, for economic or ideological reasons, if Microsoft Office is abandoned. Read on to experience pain.
You probably expect that now we will be measured by functionality and argue with foaming at the mouth, from whom it is better implemented. Nah Of course, you can find what we have implemented better, and what has been done better with them. Something we did not finish, somewhere they have bugs. And in general, all this is very subjective. Let's take a closer look at the factual side of the matter.
')
Reason number 1. ONLYOFFICE correctly opens more documents.
Shortest history of formats
Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, the main document formats were binary. And they called them doc, xls and ppt. The world of documents already rules Microsoft
The difficulty was that the Microsoft formats were closed, and the knowledge of their secrets could only be prohibited by the Jedi code by reverse engineering. And the brave
It must be said that the seemingly related formats ODF and OOXML turned out to be completely incompatible with each other. In one there are objects that are not in the other, and in the second there are such properties that are not in the first. In general, in order to overtake one into another with a simple XSLT transformation, you will not manage.
Almost all documents are stored in doc or docx
And now we will return from history to the present moment and realize this: almost 99% of all text documents in the studied part of the galaxy are stored in doc or docx formats. Moreover, most of them are in docx, because since 2007 every new document created by MS editors is saved to it by default. The doc stores mostly old documents. (And by the way, for old versions of Word in Microsoft, they wrote down a plug-in that allows you to save documents in docx. Their goal is to completely get away from the old format). At the same time, text documents in odt format in the world are just over one percent.
You can say: you took these numbers from the ceiling (no, this is not so, we did a lot of analytical work before we began to write our editors). Perhaps someone will try to prove that the ratio is 90 to 10. But this does not change the essence, since it is not 50 to 50 or even not 60 to 40. Otherwise, Libre Office (as heirs of Open Office) would already rule the world on a par with Microsoft . And Microsoft really rules: after all, in the docx format, not just most of the documents, but ALMOST ALL documents on the planet.
When we chose which of the open formats — ODF or OOXML — to do as the main one, we had little doubt. We wanted to correctly open and work with most of the documents, and not with a smaller one .
When we display a document, we essentially display a set of objects — a particular object model. In LibreOffice, the document object model corresponds to the ODF format created by Open Office programmers, in our case the object model fully conforms to the OOXML format created by Microsoft. Therefore, we open docx files better than Libre, and odt files do worse. But docx files are much larger. Thus, we better open most of the text documents existing on the planet.
(Note: we don’t say now that Libre Office is worse. Their format is objectively more rare, therefore there will be much more problems and difficulties with compatibility)
And what about the odt?
Of course, we work with this format. How to support it when our main format is incompatible with it docx? Option two: either develop a separate editor (expensive and costly), or convert. We chose the option with conversion: when you try to open odt in ONLYOFFICE editor, odt will automatically convert to docx. Unfortunately, some conversion losses are very likely, although we, of course, strive to reduce losses to a minimum.
You can save the edited file back to odt. A scheme with two conversions will turn out: odt - docx - odt. Here we must take into account that if the conversion is hay passed through a horse, then double conversion is hay passed through a horse twice.
What we want to say this part of the article: we had to sacrifice the quality of the opening odt. However, we believe that the loss of quality in 1% of cases is much less significant than the loss of quality in 99% of cases. If you understand where we're going.
Reason number 2. Online work and co-editing
The world is moving into the clouds, and working together on documents for many is not just a nice bonus, but a vital necessity. Libre Office is also working on an online version of the editors (Collabora Office).
How does the online editor Libre (no)
The developers have chosen a scheme in which the desktop editor rotates on the server, and the end-user in the browser transmits a picture of what is happening in the cloud. The actions of the user himself are transmitted to the server, the changes are processed by the editor, after which a new picture is sent to the user. Thus, the developers decided not to develop an online editor, but simply to put their finished desktop into the cloud and debug the translation mechanism.
This approach has pros and cons. Plus: with such a scheme all the functions that are in the desktop Libre will be available online. Minus: so that a large number of users can work in such an online editor, you will have to raise REALLY MANY servers. Something tells us that it will be expensive and very slow.
In addition, Libre does not currently have co-editing. At all. And since their online editor is a desktop placed in the cloud, in order to do at least some kind of work together someone will have to climb into its core (more precisely, into the code of three different desktop editors, which were also written by different teams) and produce significant changes, because all the mega-functionality of the editors should be available in collaboration. In other words, three editors will have to be refactored. As you understand, rewriting the code of the editors and making the relay mechanism are rather far from each other tasks. In general, our forecast is that the joint editing of LibreOffice will not be for a long time. But all the functions of the desktop will be.
Desktop ONLYOFFICE is a browser
We believe that we are more fortunate in this regard: we first wrote an online editor, and then redid it into the desktop. Let's say that we have co-editing by default, since the ONLYOFFICE desktop is essentially a browser that does not open all pages, but only ours - documents. To do this, we use the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), more about this can be found in our article on the anatomy of desktop editors.
Of the other advantages - we believe that our editors are editors of the “future”, they will work on everything that supports HTML, be it a new Chinese operating system or an alien technology with access to the terrestrial Internet (we assume that aliens are all they will decide to set up the Internet for themselves in order to better study our civilization).
(Very) Conclusions
If suddenly you could not read many letters above, here we briefly formulate the main differences between open source ONLYOFFICE editors and the Office Libre Office suite:
- The main format with which ONLYOFFICE works is OOXML (docx, xlsx, pptx). The main Libre format is ODF (odt, ods, odp).
- ONLYOFFICE opens better docx, Libre - odt. But most of the documents existing on Earth are stored in docx.
- Libre Office is in the process of creating an online version. On joint editing, it is not yet.
- ONLYOFFICE desktop editors have grown out of the online version. Joint editing is in them by default.
In general, you decide.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/312460/
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