[libreoffice-marketing] Crowdfunding campaign for interoperability with Microsoft® Office

Hello,

My name is Raffaele Mancuso. I am a PhD student at the Polytechnic 
University of Milan.

I have decided to switch definitely to Ubuntu after some time I had it 
in double boot.

My co-workers use Microsoft® Office and their documents are technically 
pretty complete in terms of the features used.

Unfortunately LibreOffice is unable to open them without breaking their 
layout (yes, I have all the Microsoft® fonts installed and configured 
through fontconfig).

I have submitted some bugs to the bug tracker so far, 3 of them 
regarding interoperability issues, but TDF is a small non-profit 
organization (11 people) and it's doing the best it could.

-----

1. Users reviewing LibreOffice releases have pointed out for some time 
interoperability problems with Microsoft® Office. See for example here 
<https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/libreoffice-7-review.html>.

2. As of today LibreOffice has 1268 bugs 
<https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&field0-0-0=product&field0-0-1=component&field0-0-2=alias&field0-0-3=short_desc&field0-0-4=status_whiteboard&field0-0-5=content&limit=0&no_redirect=1&order=bug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&query_format=advanced&type0-0-0=substring&type0-0-1=substring&type0-0-2=substring&type0-0-3=substring&type0-0-4=substring&type0-0-5=matches&value0-0-0=FILEOPEN&value0-0-1=FILEOPEN&value0-0-2=FILEOPEN&value0-0-3=FILEOPEN&value0-0-4=FILEOPEN&value0-0-5=%22FILEOPEN%22> 
marked as FILEOPEN and 611 bugs 
<https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&field0-0-0=product&field0-0-1=component&field0-0-2=alias&field0-0-3=short_desc&field0-0-4=status_whiteboard&field0-0-5=content&limit=0&no_redirect=1&order=bug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&query_format=advanced&type0-0-0=substring&type0-0-1=substring&type0-0-2=substring&type0-0-3=substring&type0-0-4=substring&type0-0-5=matches&value0-0-0=FILESAVE&value0-0-1=FILESAVE&value0-0-2=FILESAVE&value0-0-3=FILESAVE&value0-0-4=FILESAVE&value0-0-5=%22FILESAVE%22> 
marked as FILESAVE.

3. Interoperability problems are also seen by LibreOffice developers, 
see for example here <https://vmiklos.hu/blog/sd-pptx-better-math.html> 
where Figure 1 showing the new math import from PPTX is still broken 
with respect to the reference rendering in Figure 2 (for instance, 
formula 8,9,10 are not shown)

4. Microsoft® Office seems to hold about 40% of the market share for 
Office suites (see here 
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/961105/japan-market-share-of-office-suites-technologies/>), 
while LO has 200 million users. People using Microsoft® Office would 
more easily switch to LO if they have full-interoperability with the 
file format they have used to save all their files.

5. Firms in the LO ecosystem (like Collabora and CIB) seems to 
contribute to fix interoperability problems. See for example Release 
Notes for 7.0 here 
<https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.0> and this blog 
<https://vmiklos.hu/blog/>. They probably have access to the OOXML 
documents of their clients and have the developers to fix the 
interoperability problems.

6. The LO website claims 
<https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/>: "LibreOffice is 
compatible with a wide range of document formats such as Microsoft® Word 
(.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) and 
Publisher". It's important to deliver what we promise so as not to 
disappoint our new users.

7. Full compatibility seems to be achievable. For instance, I tried WPS® 
Office and did not have any compatibility problem so far (but I had 
compatibility issues with SoftMaker® Office 2021).

-----

I here propose to launch a crowdfunding campaign to implement full 
interoperability with Microsoft® Office formats. I can launch and manage 
the campaign if you wish.

In particular, I thought about these steps:

1. Create a "Microsoft® Office team" with the purpose to create a 
dataset of Microsoft® Office documents with increasing complexity.

For example, the dataset may contain such files as:

* ./docx/1.Text.docx

*./docx/2.SimpleTable.docx

*./docx/3.RotatedTable.docx

*./docx/4.TableWithImages.docx

And so on. We would then update a wiki page with the files of the 
dataset that we support and the ones which we don't yet.

I can make a contribution here.

2. Hire some developers and pay them a good salary to implement 
interoperability, in particular:

2.1. Submit patches to LO that improve interoperability with Microsoft® 
Office formats

2.2. Document the Microsoft extensions to the OOXML(*) format (is the 
"plain" format fully-specified in ECMA-376 
<https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-376/>, 
in ISO/IEC 29500 <https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html> and also here 
<http://www.officeopenxml.com/>?)

3. I think we should handle font substitution better. For example, when 
we open a file and fonts are missing, LO should display a window with a 
list of missing fonts in the first column, the font that have been used 
as a substitute in the second column, and whether the font used as 
substitute is metric-compatible with the missing fonts (otherwise the 
layout will break, see here 
<https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138923>) in the 
third column. Moreover, LO should have a dataset of free 
metric-compatible fonts (like Carlito to substitute for Calibri).

-------

So I open this thread to collect your feedback on this proposal.

What do you think?

What changes do you suggest to the plan outlined above?

How many people we should hire, how much should we pay them, and how 
much money should we overall collect in the campaign?

Best regards,

Raffaele Mancuso

(*) The second O in OOXML actually stands for 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML> "Open" and not for "Obscure"



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