OpenOffice.org is the reference office suite for the open source community, and its adoption has been increasing (see here and here, for example) thanks to its complete implementation of the standard ISO OpenDocument format and the good compatibility with commercial formats.
OpenOffice.org offers the possibility of extending the functionality of the suite through extensions, which can be downloaded from the OpenOffice.org extensions website. A few extensions are very useful to authors and scientists:
- OOoLatex allows LaTeX equations to be inserted in your Writer and Presenter documents, without any limitation. The LaTeX installation of your system is used to compile the LaTeX source, and the equation is added to the document as an image of the specified resolution. Equations can be edited with a click, and the image will be updated automatically.
- AST (Author Support Tool) offers an extensive suite of tools to manage templates for papers, reports, bibliographic sources and styles. In addition it allows brainstorming and cooperative work to be done thanks to an integrated versioning system, it integrates the possibility of taking personal notes, managing the progress of the work (time management), checking the style and backing up revisions.
- Magenta Chemistry allows chemical formulas to be easily insterted in documents, with the possibility of using different conventional syntaxes, and to specify if two-dimensional or three-dimensional structures have to be generated.
This is only a short list. There are many more extensions on he OpenOffice.org extensions website. Just visit it and explore!