LibreOffice leverages Google’s OSS-Fuzz to improve quality of office suite(lwn.net)
lwn.net
LibreOffice leverages Google’s OSS-Fuzz to improve quality of office suite
https://lwn.net/Articles/723566/
71 comments
It isn't the presence of bugs that drives me from this suite to MS office. It is the fact that everyone else is using it, and interop is terrible.
That's understandable, and it's great that you are able to utilize the expensive products available. As a counter, I am a broke college student that values my privacy, and I make frequent use of LibreOffice. While complete professional market penetration would do wonders to LibreOffice by increasing awareness of more bugs and bring in more developers, it isn't necessary to be very useful to some. The freedom to have the choice between the widely used product and the slightly buggy but free product is very nice to me.
I was at a conference last year where @patio11 performed a rap trying to persuade people to do all their writing in markdown. I wish I could simply link to it as an argument from authority, but consider the value of doing your writing in plaintext. You will benefit from editor choice, flexible tooling, version control, and forward compatibility. There are a lot of tools out there for "compiling" from markdown to a nicely formatted pdf, rtf, docx, or odt file.
I've got a pile of inaccessibile old university papers that for some reason are in Aldus Pagemaker format.
Edit: typo
I've got a pile of inaccessibile old university papers that for some reason are in Aldus Pagemaker format.
Edit: typo
Aldus Pagemaker? Wow. Even back then that was pretty fancy for University work.
I keep all my notes in markdown: Daily journal entries and templates, schedules, collections of code snippets; even a book which is just about ready to publish. I find that I rarely use any of the conversion tools, but they are nice when needed. Overall I'm really glad that text editing keeps evolving and find it a sort of foundation of computer use with which you can't go wrong.
I keep all my notes in markdown: Daily journal entries and templates, schedules, collections of code snippets; even a book which is just about ready to publish. I find that I rarely use any of the conversion tools, but they are nice when needed. Overall I'm really glad that text editing keeps evolving and find it a sort of foundation of computer use with which you can't go wrong.
> Aldus Pagemaker?
It was strange to use a desktop publishing tool to write papers, but I fell in love with its story editor[1], which looked like a plain text editor with a left column that indicated the applied style for that paragraph or heading. I would do all my writing in the story editor for a distraction-free experience, before I got handy with text editors.
I guess it was obvious even then that I would gravitate toward plaintext markup.
[1] InDesign ended up incorporating the story editor concept from Pagemaker: https://rockymountaintraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02...
It was strange to use a desktop publishing tool to write papers, but I fell in love with its story editor[1], which looked like a plain text editor with a left column that indicated the applied style for that paragraph or heading. I would do all my writing in the story editor for a distraction-free experience, before I got handy with text editors.
I guess it was obvious even then that I would gravitate toward plaintext markup.
[1] InDesign ended up incorporating the story editor concept from Pagemaker: https://rockymountaintraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02...
curious: what kind of txt editor(s) would make sense for non-code writing, say a novel, say w markdown or something similar? Especially if the person writing is non-technical so stuff like emacs, vim, atom don't seem like a great fit? I'm thinking something non-obtrusive and with limited options, so that UI is not getting in the way of writing, but with very litte learning curve?
And, given the example of GeorgeRRMartin, perhaps something WordStar-like would fit the bill? If so, are there good free editors in the style of WordStar?
I have this friend, and I've seen the mess of unintended font changes, sizes, styles, bulleted lists, indentation changes. and all kinds of horrible stuff in his manuscripts when I had to repair some of that damage because it was getting unusable - think he'd appreciate a more focused alternative..
And, given the example of GeorgeRRMartin, perhaps something WordStar-like would fit the bill? If so, are there good free editors in the style of WordStar?
I have this friend, and I've seen the mess of unintended font changes, sizes, styles, bulleted lists, indentation changes. and all kinds of horrible stuff in his manuscripts when I had to repair some of that damage because it was getting unusable - think he'd appreciate a more focused alternative..
For serious book writing, with proper chaptering and everything, I would probably use GitBooks.
For anything else, even though it is not open source, Typora is to me the best visual markdown editor. It even makes me tolerate it being an Electron app, so it's pretty good.
https://www.gitbook.com/
https://typora.io/
For anything else, even though it is not open source, Typora is to me the best visual markdown editor. It even makes me tolerate it being an Electron app, so it's pretty good.
https://www.gitbook.com/
https://typora.io/
I use Geany and really like it. Customizable. Even easy to e.g. type something in, press tab, and it inserts the output of your shell script or program. I use that to put the day's weather in my journal.
I know it's extreme, but Notepad. Literally and unironically; write in markdown, and it should work.
No. If for absolutely no other reason, through Windows 7 at least, Notepad allows you to undo only the last thing you've done. That's a perfect, one ingredient recipe for inevitably losing work.
Notepad++, PSPad, AkelPad, Notepad2, and SciTE are all free & good replacements for stock Notepad.
I keep my notes in LaTeX. It's like Markdown, but with math.
I will happily use Markdown for my own writing. But I would never use Word for that anyway.
What I use Word for is at Work, mainly for sending back and forth specs with an update history and annotations. I do not even read documents in Word. I “check out“ the version of a spec that I need, save it as a PDF and open it in Sumatra.
I am sure there are better tools for this. There must be, because the process sucks. But customers do it this way and I am sure it makes them jizz their pants, because if you are not enthusiastic about tools in general and know very few tools other than MS Office, it must actually seem cool and pro to be able to do it like that.
I would push better tools on customers if I would have to spend more time on reading specs. But I do not, so I will not. And Libre would not make for a improvement.
What I use Word for is at Work, mainly for sending back and forth specs with an update history and annotations. I do not even read documents in Word. I “check out“ the version of a spec that I need, save it as a PDF and open it in Sumatra.
I am sure there are better tools for this. There must be, because the process sucks. But customers do it this way and I am sure it makes them jizz their pants, because if you are not enthusiastic about tools in general and know very few tools other than MS Office, it must actually seem cool and pro to be able to do it like that.
I would push better tools on customers if I would have to spend more time on reading specs. But I do not, so I will not. And Libre would not make for a improvement.
git + markdown could be an interesting combo for back and forth written revisions (we do it at work with latex and git for research papers). But to someone outside of the tech community, it looks 100% alien of a workflow.
Much much too awkward to use. Word processors show changes of different authors in different colors, allow dynamic history, discussing proposed changes etc etc. All in an intuitive, graphical interface.
Yet, no two people manages to edit the same version of the file.
Current change integration tools each lack on their own way.
Current change integration tools each lack on their own way.
So they finally managed to reinvent git blame?
If we're trying to get people to "upgrade", why not steer them to LaTeX?
Yes, it is harder to use than markdown, and it is mostly geared toward academia, but LaTeX is also orders of magnitude more powerful.
Yes, it is harder to use than markdown, and it is mostly geared toward academia, but LaTeX is also orders of magnitude more powerful.
LyX is an excellent GUI editor for LaTeX. Saves you from having to bother with the document preamble, and by keeping the source view pane open you can still learn the underlying LaTeX. And on the rare occasions when something can't be done through the GUI there's still the ability to add code manually.
LaTeX and TeX excel when the final form of a manuscript is to be printed or be delivered as a PDF. It's possible, but not easy, to convert LaTeX to HTML, doc, or other formats. It's even harder, bordering on impossible, to convert other formats to LaTeX with high fidelity.
I believe AsciiDoc is a happy medium between Markdown and LaTeX. AsciiDoc is as powerful as DocBook, and as easy to write as Markdown.
I believe AsciiDoc is a happy medium between Markdown and LaTeX. AsciiDoc is as powerful as DocBook, and as easy to write as Markdown.
And can read files from 20+ years ago without having the formatting messed up
My point would be to do whatever to improve interop. At the least, focus on ux. Intrinsic quality of the code does little to address this, as much as we developers want otherwise.
And as a student, I definitely used free options. I encourage that use. Just don't think you will make much inroads in the commercial world. Until you can use all of the commercial world.
And as a student, I definitely used free options. I encourage that use. Just don't think you will make much inroads in the commercial world. Until you can use all of the commercial world.
That's the reason I feel google's play for the classrooms is a great entry to break Microsoft office monopoly in the workplace. Though would have preferred an open source office suit to do so.
It inter-operates better than Microsoft's own software. Try opening a document that was saved from an older version of word in the newest. LibreOffice is better.
I had a bunch of old Word-documents from a late researcher using non-latin scripts and custom fonts that needed fixing for archiving (the only important step was to make these readable by humans). Don't remember what encoding. Current version of Word wouldn't even touch these, raising errors left and right.
In the end I changed the strings that specified the problematic/missing fonts in a hex editor (I naively assumed that would do the least damage...) to a compatible font I eventually found after some digital archaeology. LibreOffice accepted these files but didn't display them correctly (as in: according to what my eyes and brain expected - "machine readable" was in a different universe at this point). I saved the hex-edited documents in whatever version of docx LibreOffice exports to. Word accepted these, displayed them as well as could be hoped, and a little bit of modern history could be saved for future generations. Not a very technical approach, I guess.
I feel the 1990's in general did a lot of damage. It's not only Word. Competing, proprietary formats together with lacking text-encodings (and in my case custom fonts messing up character tables, due to academic/linguistic needs) has caused more information loss than the decades before and after for the data I've worked with.
Suffice to say I use plain text as much as possible (markdown, latex), as text-encoding alone is hard enough.
In the end I changed the strings that specified the problematic/missing fonts in a hex editor (I naively assumed that would do the least damage...) to a compatible font I eventually found after some digital archaeology. LibreOffice accepted these files but didn't display them correctly (as in: according to what my eyes and brain expected - "machine readable" was in a different universe at this point). I saved the hex-edited documents in whatever version of docx LibreOffice exports to. Word accepted these, displayed them as well as could be hoped, and a little bit of modern history could be saved for future generations. Not a very technical approach, I guess.
I feel the 1990's in general did a lot of damage. It's not only Word. Competing, proprietary formats together with lacking text-encodings (and in my case custom fonts messing up character tables, due to academic/linguistic needs) has caused more information loss than the decades before and after for the data I've worked with.
Suffice to say I use plain text as much as possible (markdown, latex), as text-encoding alone is hard enough.
That's sounds like a proper programmer-archaeologist gig to make Vernor Vinge proud.
I could have agreed with your claim 10 years ago, but not now. I've had such problems with MS software back in office97/2000 era, but not now - on the other hand, I have had interop issues with Libreoffice back when I used it last year, so it's currently not good enough (yet?) to be used safely.
To be clear on definitions, my understanding of "interoperability" involves the following workflow - if I open a complex document made by someone else in MS Excel or Word, change one word in it, save it (in MS format) and send it back, then I have to be sure that I haven't corrupted anything else in that document - layout nuances, styles,references, pagination, whatever. Currently it's not the case, and it makes it unusable, since I can't even verify if something looks different on my computer than it had looked in MS Office.
I mean, it's a simple test - if opening ("importing"? "converting"? technically that might be more appropriate than merely opening) a document and immediately saving it changes it somehow, it's not ok.
To be clear on definitions, my understanding of "interoperability" involves the following workflow - if I open a complex document made by someone else in MS Excel or Word, change one word in it, save it (in MS format) and send it back, then I have to be sure that I haven't corrupted anything else in that document - layout nuances, styles,references, pagination, whatever. Currently it's not the case, and it makes it unusable, since I can't even verify if something looks different on my computer than it had looked in MS Office.
I mean, it's a simple test - if opening ("importing"? "converting"? technically that might be more appropriate than merely opening) a document and immediately saving it changes it somehow, it's not ok.
Reminds me of wine, which apparently has better luck with old programs than do new versions of Windows.
They are doing work on the UX, but that's work for a different kind of people than the folks who do security.
Security is an enormous concern with an office suite. The formats which need to be supported by an office suite are terrifyingly complex, and people open documents from untrusted sources on a regular basis. Opening malicious documents in office suites is a major vector for malware attacks, especially in the "commercial world".
and as soperj points out, LibreOffice often has better interop with word, especially older documents. It also correctly opens and saves ODF formats, generates better quality PDFs.
The UX is also kinda hard to objectively iterate on. The current iteration of the office ribbon generates some amount of positive feedback for new users, but experienced MSO and OO.o users often prefer the current style of LibreOffice. If iterating on the UX means anything, it probably means adding a second UI. Outside of UI, it would probably be good to get better cloud (or even collaborative) support. It's frankly not certain how that would be done, maybe federated synchronization servers.
Security is an enormous concern with an office suite. The formats which need to be supported by an office suite are terrifyingly complex, and people open documents from untrusted sources on a regular basis. Opening malicious documents in office suites is a major vector for malware attacks, especially in the "commercial world".
and as soperj points out, LibreOffice often has better interop with word, especially older documents. It also correctly opens and saves ODF formats, generates better quality PDFs.
The UX is also kinda hard to objectively iterate on. The current iteration of the office ribbon generates some amount of positive feedback for new users, but experienced MSO and OO.o users often prefer the current style of LibreOffice. If iterating on the UX means anything, it probably means adding a second UI. Outside of UI, it would probably be good to get better cloud (or even collaborative) support. It's frankly not certain how that would be done, maybe federated synchronization servers.
This is an extremely fair criticism of my post. And looking back, I regret that I was a downer on the first post.
You are right that they can and are doing both.
You are right that they can and are doing both.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but ever since Microsoft went to the ribbon-style UI I've not much liked the MSO user interface, it hides too much stuff. I find LibreOffice's menus far simpler to follow and find things in. Possibly just from having grown up on WordPerfect and Lotus 123.
Just a taste thing though I suppose.
Just a taste thing though I suppose.
I hated the ribbon style of a lot at first because only about 20% of my time was in ribbon. Once my home and all school computers switched to ribbon, I picked it up quickly. I also like knowing the hot keys to get stuff done (Alt+h+b for bold, alt+h+m+c for merging cells, etc.).
> it hides too much stuff
The Ribbon was created to improve discoverability, in part because users were constantly requesting features that the Office products already had. User testing was performed to verify that the Ribbon improved discovery. I believe there is/was a series of blog posts on the Office blog that go into great detail about the design.
> Just a taste thing though I suppose.
Could be. Or perhaps the UI/UX folks in the Office organization did the testing incorrectly.
The Ribbon was created to improve discoverability, in part because users were constantly requesting features that the Office products already had. User testing was performed to verify that the Ribbon improved discovery. I believe there is/was a series of blog posts on the Office blog that go into great detail about the design.
> Just a taste thing though I suppose.
Could be. Or perhaps the UI/UX folks in the Office organization did the testing incorrectly.
Yeah, it's just a taste thing. I personally don't like the ribbon either, but back when I worked tech support, we transitioned our workstations from Office to LibreOffice. The biggest struggles were due to a difference in UI. I think having an optional ribbon UI would make a big difference to those familiar to Microsoft's products that are trying to switch.
I could never figure out the ribbon-style UI. Always went round and round looking for my frequently used menu options.
I'm presently half way between MSO and LO - I use MSO in a VM for legacy work, mainly in Excel. And I use LO for all my other work.
I'm presently half way between MSO and LO - I use MSO in a VM for legacy work, mainly in Excel. And I use LO for all my other work.
A ribbon-style UI will be optionally available not too long from now.
You can already try it out in LibreOffice 5.3 by ticking the "Enable experimental features (may be unstable)"-checkbox in the settings under LibreOffice->Advanced. Then in the menubar, select View->Toolbar Layout->Notebookbar.
You can already try it out in LibreOffice 5.3 by ticking the "Enable experimental features (may be unstable)"-checkbox in the settings under LibreOffice->Advanced. Then in the menubar, select View->Toolbar Layout->Notebookbar.
> My point would be to do whatever to improve interop. At the least, focus on ux. Intrinsic quality of the code does little to address this, as much as we developers want otherwise.
Intrinsic quality of the code allows the developers to change the code faster and with less risk of breakage. This helps them address everything else, including interop and ux.
Intrinsic quality of the code allows the developers to change the code faster and with less risk of breakage. This helps them address everything else, including interop and ux.
Fixing the sort of bugs found by fuzzers doesn't always lead to cleaner, easier to maintain code. It depends on what the bug is and how it's fixed. Sometimes you just have to write something ugly and inscrutable to deal with how your compiler handles undefined behavior, memory allocation, etc. (Or, in other words: in unsafe languages, there's a class of bugs that occur precisely because doing it the straightforward, idiomatic way leads to the bug.)
This doesn't make this bad or mean that you should leave bugs around, but fixing bugs found by a fuzzer is unlikely to lead to improvements in Office compatability, UX, etc.
This doesn't make this bad or mean that you should leave bugs around, but fixing bugs found by a fuzzer is unlikely to lead to improvements in Office compatability, UX, etc.
This is the argument, but evidence is actually severely lacking that it is the case.
And let me be clear, I agree with the argument.
And let me be clear, I agree with the argument.
For me it’s the bugs in Microsoft Office that make me want to avoid it at all costs.
Microsoft Office isn’t some side project tossed together last weekend, it is a decades-old product from a company with billions of dollars and thousands of engineers. Therefore, it should be able to create new items in a bulleted list without completely destroying indentation, it should be able to handle pasted text without utterly confusing the style of everything else, and it should not completely fail to save customization of the Ribbon (to name just a few things still true in 2017).
If a product costing hundreds of dollars is going to misbehave like someone’s open-source side project, then I would rather invest in the open-source side project (at least that might get fixed).
Microsoft Office isn’t some side project tossed together last weekend, it is a decades-old product from a company with billions of dollars and thousands of engineers. Therefore, it should be able to create new items in a bulleted list without completely destroying indentation, it should be able to handle pasted text without utterly confusing the style of everything else, and it should not completely fail to save customization of the Ribbon (to name just a few things still true in 2017).
If a product costing hundreds of dollars is going to misbehave like someone’s open-source side project, then I would rather invest in the open-source side project (at least that might get fixed).
I remember coming across a comment from someone who worked on Word in the past. Most of the engineers don't know how it works and are scared of breaking backward compatibility.
That engineer doesn't work on Word (he worked on WordPerfect) so not knowing how a proprietary format of another company works isn't really surprising :)
I wonder how much of that is due to Microsoft making their file format opaque to enable vendor lock-in?
Opaque in what way?
In the “some old versions are practically a memory dump” way. Interesting links in the SO thread below.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/124869/how-does-the-doc-...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/124869/how-does-the-doc-...
Ah, I recall that now.
The complexity is explained, and it's not due to an attempt by Microsoft to encourage vendor lock-in. I'm curious of the commenter I replied to above has evidence to the contrary.
The complexity is explained, and it's not due to an attempt by Microsoft to encourage vendor lock-in. I'm curious of the commenter I replied to above has evidence to the contrary.
[deleted]
I used OpenOffice then LibreOffice for about two years. I did a lot of homework and presentations from LibreOffice, including my senior thesis.
I switched to MS Office 2011 and then MS Office 2016 afterward. The 2016 suite is by far the best from UI design to response time. Besides interop (since at work everyone uses MS Office suites) (I am using Outlook at work so I don't bother with a separate Office suite), but also because of stability and performance. Perhaps now LibreOffice is better, but I am going to stick to Office, plus I've an educational license (forgot if it's 4 or 5 years for ~$100) from using my university's email address.
I switched to MS Office 2011 and then MS Office 2016 afterward. The 2016 suite is by far the best from UI design to response time. Besides interop (since at work everyone uses MS Office suites) (I am using Outlook at work so I don't bother with a separate Office suite), but also because of stability and performance. Perhaps now LibreOffice is better, but I am going to stick to Office, plus I've an educational license (forgot if it's 4 or 5 years for ~$100) from using my university's email address.
MS Word being able to open MS Word proprietary format files isn't "interop".
You can claim MS Word is good at interop if it can open, display, and save the other main wordprocessor file formats with good verity.
Arguably you'd want [reverse] interop as part of that too, that MS would openly publish all details of their formats to enable other programs to use those formats.
What you describe is using a format for the benefits of the monopoly position of that format. That's very different from interop. I'm not saying you're wrong to do that, just IMO wrong to describe it as interop.
You can claim MS Word is good at interop if it can open, display, and save the other main wordprocessor file formats with good verity.
Arguably you'd want [reverse] interop as part of that too, that MS would openly publish all details of their formats to enable other programs to use those formats.
What you describe is using a format for the benefits of the monopoly position of that format. That's very different from interop. I'm not saying you're wrong to do that, just IMO wrong to describe it as interop.
MS would openly publish all details of their formats to enable other programs to use those formats.
(I must have missed this when I made my other comment.)
They have. For a decade. ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500.
(I must have missed this when I made my other comment.)
They have. For a decade. ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500.
> What you describe is using a format for the benefits of the monopoly position of that format.
What benefit is there to having a plurality of word processing formats? HTML has a monopoly. Is that a bad thing?
What benefit is there to having a plurality of word processing formats? HTML has a monopoly. Is that a bad thing?
HTML is an open documented standard, Office's are not. That's why it's a bad thing.
Office's are not.
Yes they are. For a decade.
(Now, my understanding is that they aren't a great open documented standard, but making the niceness of the format the issue would be moving the goalposts.)
So I'm still curious about what I asked above.
Yes they are. For a decade.
(Now, my understanding is that they aren't a great open documented standard, but making the niceness of the format the issue would be moving the goalposts.)
So I'm still curious about what I asked above.
Interoptability really isn't terrible for general purpose stuff
In big scientific projects we are now using Google Docs.
Although not a totally Open Source workflow, it does provide the possibility of using it in any system we personally work and makes sharing and editing documents from various parties much easier.
For me, this signals a paradigm shift at least in academia where we would normally use open source in various places, but revert to Office to write collaboration documents and proposals (and even scientific papers in some areas like biology).
Although not a totally Open Source workflow, it does provide the possibility of using it in any system we personally work and makes sharing and editing documents from various parties much easier.
For me, this signals a paradigm shift at least in academia where we would normally use open source in various places, but revert to Office to write collaboration documents and proposals (and even scientific papers in some areas like biology).
> Google Docs... Although not a totally Open Source workflow
It seems like it's not open source at all.
It seems like it's not open source at all.
well, libre office is also working on a fully functional online office suite.
LibreOffice is functional, it does the work. But it still looks substantially like its ancestor Sun StarOffice, and many years have past since then. There are experimental features that enable a "ribbon UI" but they're still in the works.
I was looking into other office suites, other than the known ones such as Calligra suite (formerly KOffice) and GNOME Office, and ran into one called "WPS office", written in Delphi and C++ by a Chinese company called Kingsoft. http://wps-community.org/
The WPS UI looks very polished, I have to say. But I haven't used it much. Does anyone here have any thoughts about it?
I was looking into other office suites, other than the known ones such as Calligra suite (formerly KOffice) and GNOME Office, and ran into one called "WPS office", written in Delphi and C++ by a Chinese company called Kingsoft. http://wps-community.org/
The WPS UI looks very polished, I have to say. But I haven't used it much. Does anyone here have any thoughts about it?
WPS' UI is polished indeed, with themes and tabs. It's better than LibreOffice for simple documents, but it has quite a few glitches for more "advanced" functionalities (at least on Linux): copying and pasting does weird things, figures aren't handled correctly, etc. It has better Microsoft Office compatibility for old documents, from what I've seen.
link to OSS-Fuzz project https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz
Would rather see a good Chrome/VSCode like auto updating. Updating Libre office is a pain especially when you use another language. You are supposed to download and install the new version, run it once, then install the language pack.
Very very end user unfriendly IMHO.
Very very end user unfriendly IMHO.
If you use a system that requires an auto updater like Windows, then may be it is better if libreoffice can be made in to a store app so that it updates with other such apps.
I'm still waiting for someone to make a word process on the level of LibreOffice that will create a markdown document just as easily as it will a .doc and will allow me to convert between the two with ease.
Pandoc is pretty close to that.
Pandoc with atom (and the enhanced markdown plugin) works quite well in my experience.
I imagine that LibreOffice's Office binary format code is much different from MS Office's own and probably much more robust to invalid input. Of course, this comes at the cost of compatibility.