Office

Edit PDFs with Xournal

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 12:00:00 +0000

Forget all of those magical command-line PDF incantations and edit your PDFs easily with Xournal.

Somehow, despite all the issues with proprietary clients and the history of security issues with Acrobat, PDFs have become the de facto standard for your average print-ready document shared around the office. Sure, people might use some kind of open document format or a cloud editor if they intend to edit a document, but if the goal is to print the document or lock its contents in place, most people these days will export it to a PDF.

Reading PDFs is typically fine on Linux, because Linux has plenty of applications that can open PDFs for viewing, and you easily can print PDFs under Linux as well. Even Adobe supplied a proprietary (and somewhat outdated) port of its Acrobat Reader for Linux. Some distributions also offer the ability to create a special software printer that converts any print job sent to it into a local PDF file.

The problem comes when people want to turn read-only print-ready PDFs into read-write documents you need to modify. As more people work in paperless offices with strictly digital documents and fewer people own fax machines, you are more likely to find official documents like contracts show up in your INBOX in PDF format. These contracts likely were created with a proprietary PDF editor tool, and they usually have blanks for you to fill in and often signature lines so you can add a real signature. Unfortunately, for the longest time, even if you were using Adobe's own Linux port of Acrobat Reader, you couldn't reliably edit these PDFs, and you certainly couldn't easily add a real signature.

A lot of Linux applications claim the ability to edit PDFs from graphical tools like GIMP, or the aforementioned Acrobat Reader or tools like Inkscape. In the past, I've even gone so far as to use command-line tools to convert a PDF into multiple pages of a different format, edit that format, then use the command-line tools to convert it back to a PDF.

Then I discovered Xournal. Xournal is a graphical tool that's designed for note-taking and sketching either with a keyboard and mouse or even with a tablet and stylus. This program is pretty common, and you should be able to install it in any major Linux distribution, but otherwise, you can download the software from its Sourceforge page.

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WPS Office 2016 for Linux

James Gray — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 11:19:31 +0000

by James Gray

Promising the world's best office experience for the Linux community, WPS Software presents WPS Office 2016 for Linux: a high-performing yet considerably more affordable alternative to Microsoft Office that is fully compatible with and comparable to the constituent PowerPoint, Excel and Word applications. The WPS Office suite, with more than 1.2 billion installs across all platforms, is a complete office suite, including Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheets and a built-in PDF reader. Linux, Windows, Android and iOS versions are available.

WPS Office 2016 for Linux offers enhancements for the international Linux user community including remote file sharing, added search functionality, updated WPS export to PDF hyperlinks and improved IO operations for improved WPS file access speed. Compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats includes PPT, DOC, DOCX, XLS and XLSX. The Linux edition of WPS Office is compatible with Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix and other platforms, supporting both 32- and 64-bit computing environments. The latest update is made possible with the support of the WPS Office Linux community.

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Retro United Ltd.'s Write!

James Gray — Mon, 22 May 2017 11:27:35 +0000

by James Gray

Even when you're sequestered in a monastery with nothing to do but write, you still need a tool to record your thoughts. Realizing the overabundance of bloatware out there—replete with features, icons, templates, check boxes and other stuff that consumes screen space and RAM—Retro United, Ltd., released Write!, a new distraction-free text editor for Linux, Windows and MacOS.

Write! is an elegant workspace for any kind of writing, from notes to to-do lists, tweets and novels—writing projects and texts of any kind. It has all the features of a good word processor, notes Retro, packed into a clutter-free interface. Write! is as functional as it is aesthetically pleasing with a minimalist design and features a specialized focus mode for concentrating on a single paragraph at a time.

Write!'s publishing feature lets users quickly publish their writing online for target readers—for example, Twitter followers—and a dark theme makes nighttime writing pleasant for the eyes.

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Sometimes My Office Goes with Me

Shawn Powers — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 10:34:54 +0000

by Shawn Powers

A year or so ago, I wrote a short article titled "Network Go Bag". During the past year, I've gotten lots of email about that bag and actually quite a few questions about working while traveling in general. Lately I've been traveling again, so I thought I'd put together the "How I Do It" information into a single article. I often write about what I use, so you've probably already heard of some of these things, but nonetheless, here it goes.

Work Area

Usually, if I'm staying at a hotel while traveling, there will be some sort of desk in the room that I can take over as a temporary workstation. The room I'm in this week doesn't actually have a desk, so I had to run to the local department store and buy a table. Figure 1 shows the table I bought. It was $29, and I have no idea how I'm going to fit it into the car to bring home. You can't see the chair in the photo, but it's a folding chair I "borrowed" from a conference room. Metal folding chairs hurt your rear end after a while, so for a cushion, I'm sitting on a bag of dirty clothes. Yes, I travel in style, and I'm super classy.

Figure 1. Yep, that's a party-size bag of saltwater taffy—and about 50 empty wrappers.

The other side of the room has a little nightstand (Figure 2), which was oddly placed nowhere near the bed. That's okay, because I used the table to set up a coffee station. The room also didn't have a coffee pot, so I picked up this single-serve Keurig-compatible coffee pot for $29. It's terrible. Seriously, if I reviewed coffee pots for a living, this would be my example of the worst coffee pot I've ever used. Still, I can't work in a room without coffee, so for the week, I'll just suffer. But I'm leaving this pot here; I don't want it at home. (And yes, I don't eat terribly healthy on the road. Ramen is about it. You can cook only so many things with a subpar, single-serve coffee pot.)

Figure 2. Coffee and ramen—the fancy creamers are for my wife.

Hardware

Basically, I carry a router, a Wi-Fi extender, network cabling and extension cords. I've been in a situation where I tied my Wi-Fi extender inside a grocery bag with a lithium-ion battery and happily had Wi-Fi access in a cabin outside of range. I was my own superhero.

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Ascensio System SIA's ONLYOFFICE

James Gray — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 21:00:00 +0000

by James Gray

Ascensio System SIA boasts that its ONLYOFFICE office and productivity suite combines the best from the MS Office and Google Docs worlds. ONLYOFFICE is a free and open-source solution and is distributed under the AGPL v.3 license.

Ascensio says that its solution trumps Google Docs' collaborative capabilities, allowing users to choose how to co-edit documents—for example, "Fast" (like in Google Docs) or "Strict" (when the changes appear after saving). ONLYOFFICE also out-features MS Office Online, asserts Ascensio, allowing its users to work with auto-shapes, -formulas and -charts online.

Regarding file formats, Ascensio claims better support for MS Office formats than any other open-source office suite, and it is fully compatible with OpenDocument formats as well. The recently updated ONLYOFFICE 8.9 features the updated collaboration system called Community Server, which includes mail and calendar integration and mail autoreply. Meanwhile, the updated document editors, aka the Document Server, now offer fast real-time co-editing, commenting and integrated chat, reviewing and tracking changes, and version history.

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SoftMaker FreeOffice

James Gray — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 15:20:20 +0000

by James Gray

The bottom line on SoftMaker FreeOffice 2016—the updated, free, full-featured Office alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office suite—is this: no other free office suite offers as high a level of file compatibility with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This maxim applies to both Windows and Linux operating systems, says the suite's maker, SoftMaker Software GmbH. SoftMaker asserts that the myriad competing free alternatives often harbor problems opening the Excel, Word and PowerPoint file formats loss-free. Sometimes the layout and formatting get lost, and on other occasions, files cannot even be opened. SoftMaker sees itself as the positive exception to this rule, especially with the newly overhauled FreeOffice 2016. Benefiting greatly from SoftMaker's commercial offering, SoftMaker Office 2016, FreeOffice 2016 adds features such as improved graphics rendering, compatibility with all current Linux distributions and Windows flavors (XP to Windows 10), new EPUB export and improved PDF export and many other MS-Office interoperability enhancements.

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Google Drive for Linux?

Shawn Powers — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 17:56:18 +0000

by Shawn Powers

For some reason, Google seems to dislike Google Drive users who prefer Linux. I find this particularly strange, since Google's Chrome OS is based on Linux. Thankfully, the folks over at Insync not only provide Linux support for Google Drive syncing, they do it with style.

Insync is a commercial, proprietary application that installs natively in Linux. It offers selective sync, integration with several file managers and a nice tray icon showing sync activity. The coolest feature, however, is the seamless conversion from Google Docs format to LibreOffice format. You can edit your Google Drive documents with the native LibreOffice application, and then it automatically will sync to the cloud in the Web-based Google Docs format! I've tried only a few documents, but in my limited testing, the conversion and sync have been perfect.

Insync has a 15-day free trial and a one-time cost of $9.99. Packages are available for Ubuntu, Fedora, MEPIS and even an unofficial build for Arch Linux. Now that version 1.0 has been released, Insync is available for anyone to download. Due to its native Linux support and super-cool conversion/sync ability, Insync earns this month's Editors' Choice award.

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