[LINK] comparison of OO and LO

[Glen Turner]

> Does anyone know, for example, if either support Publisher files in some way?

LibreOffice 4.0 has a Publisher import filter. There is no export filter planned.
http://fridrich.blogspot.ch/2012/06/libreoffice-ms-publisher-import-filter.html
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fixes/#Filters

There's a sustained push for LibreOffice to import all historical formats -- to give people a way to bring their documents forward -- and every release brings a few more. The fidelity varies a lot, as the focus is usually in getting the content of the document across.

LibreOffice 4.0 isn't recommended for production use, and I've had a few issues with it on a Mac that I didn't have with LibreOffice 3.6. It's free, so install it and pull some Publisher files in and see how it goes. LibreOffice is pretty good at making releases stable, so if 4.0.0 isn't great for you, check back at the next release.

> Any advice? Should I switch?


I use LibreOffice. Basically the people who cleaned up OpenOffice had a issue with the new owners and forked to form LibreOffice. Later on Oracle contributed OpenOffice to Apache, but with a license not compatible with the GPL, this meant that the code couldn't be recombined.

In practice LibreOffice tends to have more and better features and fewer bugs, but there's not much in it. I've found that OpenOffice irritatingly keeps saying how good things will be (e.g. OpenOffice still haven't merged IBM's Symphony fork), whereas LibreOffice seems to be better at getting on with it. In a sense OpenOffice can't win, as due to the licensing difference source can flow OO-->LO but not LO-->OO. That's lead to Apache sitting on the Symphony source code, in the fear that LO would pinch it as soon as it appeared in OO, or worse, integrated it sooner.

My feeling is that the only thing OpenOffice has going for it is the name recognition.

Note that DOCX round-trip formatting errors are taken very seriously by LibreOffice, so feel free to write a bug report and attach a test document.

Cheers, glen