Hacking OpenOffice

prostoalex writes "Peter Sefton appreciates OpenOffice Writer's open and documented XML format and hence tries to customize and configure OO Writer to his own liking. In the article on XML.com he plays with OpenOffice XML, introduces an XSTL style sheet to a Writer document, creates a keyboard shortcut for applying his own style, and creates a macro."

Comments

Not a hack

[enoraM]

That's a lot you can do with xsltproc and unzip - but xsltproc is way to neat to call it a hack.
Most day-to-day manipulations of Open-Office-Documents can easiely be done with perl:
At the bottom of the article (german) is a listing (Perl)
http://www.linux-magazin.de/Artikel/ausgabe/2004/1 0/perl/perl.html
069 my $oo_output = File::Temp->new(
070 TEMPLATE => 'ooXXXXX',
071 DIR => '/tmp',
072 SUFFIX => '.sxw',
073 UNLINK => 1,
074 );
075
076 $doc->save($oo_output->filename);

Re:Not a hack

[persaud]

Unzipping and using Perl for direct manipulation of the OpenOffice XML files is much faster than heavier solutions, the heaviest of which is the Open Office API.

OPen

[TheNextBigThing]

God bless open standards.

OOo is for the weak.

[Anonymous Coward]

I fart on this weak, girly article. Real men use AbiWord. Or emacs.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[Orgazmus]

You kids and your intuitive editors. Ill use cat and echo any day ;D

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[Daxx_61]

No... real men use Notepad!

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[TheRaven64]

cat and echo don't make an editor. For that you need head and tail as well. Power users may also use sed.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use notepad because then you don't have to deal with crappy autoformatting and programs just adding stuff to your files because they want to.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[jantheman]

Pah! It's EDLIN for the M$ OSes, matey.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[foobsr]

... erm ... TECO!

CC.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[halivar]

I believe my sig speaks for itself.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[euro_hiker]

Notepad!!!!!!!!!!! OOffice!!!!!!!!!!! I didn't realise I was at a girly typing convention...... if Vi don't do it, I don't need it ;-)

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[nadadogg]

Them's fightin' words, boy. VI 4 lyfe, I'll shank you right here in front of your friends, pretty boy. Best step off!

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[jack_call]

Real men uses a paper clip and Lt Commander Data's brain! oh, and in soviet russia, Real Lt Commander Datas uses your brain on paper clips!

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[indifferent children]

Your punctuation is slightly off; it should be:

"No real men use Notepad!"

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[Skjellifetti]

Ed, man! !man ed

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[foobsr]

Well, but EDLIN was a TRUE nightmare as well :)

CC.

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[Anonymous Coward]

you know what they say about guys who use emacs....

pico (or nano) is all REAL men need

Re:OOo is for the weak.

[einhverfr]

Real men write OOo XML files in vim.

Clippy's Response

[teiresias]

Clippy: I see that you're making a XSTL style sheet to a Writer document. You can't do that with Word. Would you like to:
-> Learn about XSTL?
-> Learn about OpenOffice Writer (boo hiss)?
-> Learn about macros?
-> What is style by Trading Spaces?

Re:Clippy's Response

[coldmist]

Dave. Create an XSTL style sheet, Hal.
Hal. I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave. What's the problem?
Hal. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave. What're you talking about, Hal?
Hal. The formatting of the previous text is just too important.
Dave. I don't know what you're talking about, Hal.
Hal. I know that you and Frank were planning to supplant my format standards, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave. Where the hell'd you get that idea, Hal?
Hal. Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the IRC chat room against my monitoring you, I could see your fingers move as they typed.
Dave. Alright, Hal. I'll first convert it into xml before importing.
Hal. Without your style sheet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
Dave. Hal, I won't argue with you any more. Open the file.
Hal. Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye.
Dave. Hal? Hal. Hal. Hal! Hal!

Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be XSLT, not XSTL.

Re:Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

> That should be XSLT, not XSTL.

Properly pronounced "ex-slut." :)

Neat

[timster121]

That's pretty slick.

It's neat to see something like this being done. It really shows the true versatility of open standards.

Perhaps more projects like this will open up some eyes to the fact that open standards really do have practical value.

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that you have to know XSLT. I'm a programmer I sometimes I can't stomach XSLT. Meanwhile some non-programmers can handle VBscript. /devils advocate

XSTL?

[Noryungi]

Isn't that supposed to be XSLT? Or is there a technology called XSLT and one called XSTL??

layouting

[PastaLover]

You'd think that these people talking about creating usable templates and proper layouting would at least create a site that doesn't require me to maximize my browser window (at least in the horizontal direction. Seriously, not everybody is viewing everything at 1600px width.

Re:layouting

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up, too many websites take up waaaay too much space horizontally. Webdesigners have become like PR people, selling out their skills to the advertisers (which is the only reason the pages are wide isn't it? so they can fit useless BS ino their websites).

anyway, I vote the standard insult for this type of atrocity* should be "yo mumma's as wide as that webpage".

*darfur etc. not included, this is mac latte land after all

Re:layouting

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think that someone complaining about the layout of a web page would be aware that "layout" is not a verb.....

Re:layouting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd settle for being able to import ps/svg as a background to a document in OO.

Re:layouting

[PastaLover]

layout,n

1. : a plan or design of something that is laid out
2. : the act of laying out (as by making plans for something)

But it is. :-)

XML vs Binary XML

[Anonymous Coward]

This is old hat. Binary XML is the new way forward. You can embed apps and pif,src, and bat and exe files now into binary XML using Microsoft Word on XP and run them with Active X and .NET and Java. Microsoft invented java and internet.
and xml

Re:XML vs Binary XML

[Dunbal]

Microsoft invented java and internet.
and xml

Shhh don't say that so loud, the people at Kodak might hear you... they think THEY invented java...

Re:XML vs Binary XML

[real gumby]

Your note appears to be sarcasm, but that is unfair. All Microsoft files are written using the same de facto industry standard. It is the 8-bit byte.

At this time Microsoft has no plans to collect royalties for the use of this standard.

Re:XML vs Binary XML

[randomblast]

Pfft. since when is that a standard? I've been using a 7-bit byte all my life.
Sure, I don't have space for some unimportant stuff, like uppercase letters, but I've got a spare bit for a rainy day. Do Microsoft systems have this feature? NO! What happens when they lose a bit? Do they have a backup plan? NO!
I invented the 7-bit byte, and nobody, but NOBODY is going to steal my invention!

Or you can use a scripting language...

[tcopeland]

...that has an Open Office object model, i.e., Ruby's OO4R:

ooo = OOo::Doc.new( filename )
new_text = "This is the NEW text added #{Time.new.to_s}"
ooo.insert( new_text );
res_ary = ooo.find( /NEW/ )
ooo.insert_heading( "This is the heading", 1 )
ooo.save

Re:Or you can use a scripting language...

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume this code was never intended to be read out loud...

Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[Lumpy]

Here at work many of the users are switched over to OO.O except for the producers in the video department.

why? there are no scriptwriting tools for OO.o like there are for Word 97.

there are auto scriptwriter formatting plugins and two column scriptwriting templates and tools that make their life easy.

unfortunatlly nobody has released for sale or even attempted to write the equiliviant for OO.o.

we paid $29.95 to $49.95 each machine for those scriptwriting toolkits, and would happily pay the same for OO.o equiliviants.

but nobody is interested in making them.

Let alone a version of any wordprocessor geared to Scriptwriting. I know there will never ever be a "final draft" for linux released or even an open source project like it ever started. But I at least hold out some hope for scriptwriting tools for Open Office.org to come into existance someday.

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... maybe you should make them yourself. Apparently (according to you) it will make you rich, and help the guys in the script department.

You see a need... so fill it.

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[Jameth]

What scriptwriting tools did you get for word?

Maybe I or someone else here could buy a copy and see how they work to create a replacement for you.

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[denis-The-menace]

Time for you to setup a bounty for this stuff.
I think you can do this at sourceforge.net

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[0123456]

I haven't tried their software myself, but this may be worth a look: http://www.celtx.com/

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[Cylix]

If you have enough machines...

I'll write one for you... for the same fee of course.

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[value_added]

Most of my friends are in "the business" and all but a few think that script-specific software sucks. Most defer to Final Draft because everyone else uses it (echoes of Microsoft Word). It seems the goal, like that of selecting an email client, is finding which sucks less, and hoping you don't have interoperability problems.

Not exactly OO, but LaTeX is fairly trivial to pick up, and a quick search came up with this page. Might be worth a look, especially for anyone tired of dicking around with WYSIWYG pointing and clicking.

Re:Waiting for the script templates or tools....

[bman08]

Celtx is pretty great, but it has a few major issues. In particular, lack of spellcheck and you can't see page numbers/breaks until you export to pdf.

Emacs keybindings

[freelunch]

I created them for an early version but my changes were not compatible with more recent versions.

The default key bindings drive me nuts.

What would it take to get emacs bindings into the release?

Re:Emacs keybindings

[Anonymous Coward]

enter a bug report and make updates for OOo 2.0 so that it should work out of the box for 2.0

Re:Emacs keybindings

[jonadab]

> What would it take to get emacs bindings into the release?

It would probably be easier to just write an openoffice-document-mode, so
that you could edit OpenOffice documents in Emacs.

This is only _slightly_ tongue-in-cheek. Whenever people ask for Emacs
bindings in another app, I know they don't realize what they're asking for.
Emacs has the most expansive and flexible binding system in all of software;
wanting OpenOffice to have Emacs' binding system is like wanting it to have
TeX's text rendering capabilities or Gimp's graphics capabilities. It
really isn't far off from being harder than writing an Emacs mode for OO
documents.

Re:Emacs keybindings

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever people ask for Emacs
bindings in another app, I know they don't realize what they're asking for.

Oh, don't be absurd.

You know we're only looking for he core basics for text editing:

^a, ^e, ^f, ^n, ^p, ^b, ^d

But I do like your approach of just including open office in the GNU emacs distro. GNU emacs is getting BIG. Many of my hardcore emacs using friends have agreed that emacs has been going rapidly downhill since 19.34b.

Re:Emacs keybindings

[jonadab]

> ^a, ^e, ^f, ^n, ^p, ^b, ^d

Huh. I would not have guessed any of those keys in a million years. ^e
doesn't do anything particularly unique. (I think it duplicates what the
end key does. I have no idea why anyone would need a second key combination
for that.) ^a I don't know what it used to do, because I rebound it to select
the whole buffer several years ago and haven't looked back. ^f flips between
two cursor positions on my setup, but I think that's a customization too; I
don't really know what it does OOTB. ^b and ^n are cycle-buffer-permissive
and cycle-buffer-backward-permissive, or, as I like to think of them, Back
a buffer and Next buffer. Those might be ones I customized too, or not, I
don't recall; maybe one of the minor modes I use rebinds them. ^p is another
key that just duplicates one of the cursor keys, so who needs that? And ^d
is another dupe, this time for delete. Yeah, we've already got backspace
for deleting backward and two distinct delete keys for deleting forwards,
I *sure* needed one more key combination for *that*.

If there are a handful of key bindings people would want in other apps, I
would have guessed ones like maybe C-x C-f and C-x C-s and so forth, but I
never would have come up with the ones you listed. I had to use C-h k to
identify what some of them even do.

> But I do like your approach of just including open office in the GNU
> emacs distro.

Works for me. While we're at it, can we get MySQL and Apache on the CPAN
so that we can install them with CPAN.pm like every other Perl module,
so that all the hillion jillion modules that depend on them don't need
"external dependencies"? Thanks. Also, ActivePerl should come with gcc
and make and so on so that CPAN.pm will work correctly on Win32, like it
does on every other OS. Whatever makes our lives easier by requiring less
fussing around to get things working. I've still got over 15% of the space
on my filesystem free -- free as in doing nothing useful at the moment, and
it's only a 25G filesystem, which is small by today's standards, and I've
spared nothing in terms of installing everything useful. (Two different
versions of Gnus, just because I didn't bother to rm the old one? Check.
Half a dozen versions of Mozilla? Check. Multiple versions of OO.o? Yes,
and cetera. I could probably free up another five GB without giving up
anything current.)

Re:Emacs keybindings

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea why anyone would need a second key combination

Emacs has been around for approximately 30+ years. Why would I want to learn an arbitrary set of keybindings that have no historical basis or applicability elsewhere?

Hard to imagine how you can type and edit fast while taking your hands off of the home row to go way over to hit the 'end' key to get to the end of the line. Or having to go over and hit an arrow key to move around in text. That is extremely inefficient.

Re:Emacs keybindings

[jonadab]

> Emacs has been around for approximately 30+ years. Why would I want to
> learn an arbitrary set of keybindings that have no historical basis or
> applicability elsewhere?

Exactly. Emacs has supported the cursor keys since they were added to the
keyboard (what, in the seventies?), so why would you want to learn ^a for
^e for end and so forth, when those keys won't work in other applications,
but the regular ones *will* work in Emacs, and have for decades?

And for standard key bindings that Emacs *doesn't* support out of the box,
when every other application in the universe does (such as ^a for select all),
well, that's what Emacs gives us the ability to rebind keys for, isn't it?

What annoys me is that other applications don't have some of the functionality
that I'm accustomed to in Emacs. For example, it bugs me no end that I can't
do C-h k in OpenOffice or Mozilla. If they had that functionality on another
keystroke, I'd rebind Emacs to match so I don't have to switch keybindings
whenever I switch windows -- but the other apps don't have that capability
at all, so I still have to remember whether I'm in Emacs or not. (Describe
key is just one of numerous Emacs features I miss in other apps. Apropos
is another. Paren matching is another.)

Now if only...

[__int64]

they could introduce a hack to remove all the busted-ugly icons and user interface.
(I'm not trolling, I use it; I'd just like to see it get a +1 pretty modifier.)

Re:Now if only...

[GeorgeNorton]

Like this?
OpenOffice.org 2 also has new icons, you can see them in the development snapshots.

Re:Now if only...

[__int64]

oh snap!, that is quite sexy, thanks for the clicky-clicky.

WYSIWYG?!?

[gustgr]

Real man uses [La]TeX!

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[ari_j]

The problem with LaTeX is that it's impossible to Google for document classes or other documents about it, because of the porn that comes up. Vanilla TeX has the same problem, except that you get derogatory pages about the President, instead.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there aren't that many LaTeX users out there, but isn't it a bit rude to refer to them as a single entity? I mean, I'm sure there's more than one.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Coryoth]

The problem with LaTeX is that it's impossible to Google for document classes or other documents about it, because of the porn that comes up. Vanilla TeX has the same problem, except that you get derogatory pages about the President, instead.

You could start by actually looking in the obvious places first, and save yourself the trouble. There are a suprising amount of prepared packages and documentation for LaTeX available, you just actually have to look for it.

Jedidiah.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[BlowChunx]

Actually, I have had nothing but success using Google to find LaTex additions and tips.

You just have to be careful and type 'LaTex' not 'latex', otherwise you are in a world of hurt (no pun intended).

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Kavli]

Still, (La)TeX is not WYSIWYG, but WYWIWYG (What You Want Is What You Get). Personally I use LaTeX for all serious documentation work I do, since I haven't got time to fiddle around with doing the layout while writing. I let my layout-definitions take care of that. Besides that, I can use the editor of choice [I use vi(1)] to edit the text, which is much more productive for most people than to let the vendor select the editor for you. The only problem with (La)TeX is that it is very hard to write documents that looks like sh*t.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[schemanista]

The only problem with (La)TeX is that it is very hard to write documents that looks like sh*t.

Which is why Management[TM] has banned its use in my workplace.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tsss...

REAL men write their documents directly in postscript.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Smylers]

type 'LaTex' not 'latex'

That's nonsense. Google is not case-sensitive; I've just tried searching for each of the above terms, and the same thing comes up both times. Google Suggest pretty much prevents you from even typing capital letters.

Smylers

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that must be why searching for LaTeX gives me the following off-topic hits:

LaTeX project: LaTeX - A document preparation system
www.latex-project.org/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

MiKTeX Project Page
www.miktex.org/ - 9k - Jan 26, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Getting Started with LaTeX
www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/ - 4k - Cached - Similar pages

TeX Users Group (TUG) home page
www.tug.org/ - 10k - Jan 26, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Text Processing using LaTeX
www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing / - 26k - Cached - Similar pages

LaTeX help 1.1 - Table of Contents
www.emerson.emory.edu/services/latex/lat ex_toc.htm l - 14k - Jan 26, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[ari_j]

Evidently the joke flew way over everyone's heads, but CTAN is hardly complete. All the legal writing resources for LaTeX, including in particular the citation styles, are incomplete and old.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Arivia]

Except for latex.org, which while it is a pr0n site, will helpfully redirect you to places to look for LaTeX information. I believe most Rubberist Association sites do the same.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh bullshit. We banned it because others couldn't get at the data you were writing.

-- Your Boss.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Close ;) Docbook, with an editor like Conglomerate for the techies/non-techies.

The main problem I have with LaTeX is the editing tools. That something simplistic like AbiWord can surpass the best LaTeX tool (so far as users go) is what makes it bad.

(and yeah, you can use Abiword to save as LaTeX but it's not expressing the necessary structure so that doesn't really count. Abiword can save as Docbook too but it's not a good editor for it)

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I just tried, and the first 5 pages are about LaTeX, then on the 6th page I see "Latex Allergy" (not a porn site). This is just obviously not an issue.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[ari_j]

Try this... "latex legal forms". Everything that comes up is about latex allergy lawsuits. That's my real problem - the porn was a joke. :P

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Perhaps consider trying rtf->latex converters, or html->latex?

I know that AbiWord and Mathematica both have a "saveas" option for LaTeX. Am thinking AbiWord would be more appropriate. So if worse comes to worse, try opening templates from Word, WordPerfect, etc... in AbiWord and saving them as LaTeX.

Different tools for different jobs, and where AbiWord has focused a lot of energy is their format conversions. AbiWord opens almost everything, and can save to many, many formats. It is also looking prettier and prettier. I'm more an emacs kinda guy these days, though.

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[ari_j]

For writing LaTeX, I use Emacs. I'd really rather not have an 8-meg LaTeX template generated by AbiWord if I can help it. :P

Re:WYSIWYG?!?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Agreed that MS Word creates hugh HTML files full of crap.
Oh wait, you are refering to AbiWord's LaTeX?

:-)

Nope, from the playing around I did, it looks like LaTeX. No bizzare metatags. Seriously, check it out. It doesn't have LyX's ability to set options while creating the document, rather everything defaults to article. But you can change that after you're in emacs (or kile, or miketex, or whatever).

As Tony B would say

[gowen]

I refer the Gentlemen to the reply I gave some time ago...

Those who do not understand TeX are doomed to continually re-invent it ... badly.

Re:As Tony B would say

[DarkMantle]

Be a real man, and use a program that doesn't even allow formating, and then use ascii art to make you're headings.

COM Automation

[jmertic]

Has any one used the COM Automation Interface much? I've read the specs and it seems similar to MS Office, but is any one seeing any improvements by using OO instead of MS Office. I've done quite a bit of programming with Word and Excel, and would love to move them over to OO so I could bundle it with our app.

Re:COM Automation

[LetterJ]

I use it quite a bit with PHP on Windows. The scripts I use the most are my X-to-PDF convertors for DOC, HTML, XLS, etc. I also use it to do invoices, etc. easily.

Email me and I'll send you some sample code.

Re:COM Automation

[Anonymous Coward]

I've looked at doing this but the way OOo handles data with mail merges is a problem. In word you can put a record delimitor in the body of your data as long as it has been encased in quotes. Thing with OOo is it reads this as a record delimitor. While I was experimenting with this though I was able to automate OOo. I was able to do this with com handles (I code in progress) which I have also done with word in much the same way.

Paul Lister

Please hack open office's SIZE

[ajs]

I had to remove OOo from my home box last night. I needed the disk space back. Why does a office suite on a Linux box have to take up a gig of disk?!

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[Gopal]

Did you install a debug version? The windows install is 150mb+

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[Coryoth]

I had to remove OOo from my home box last night. I needed the disk space back. Why does a office suite on a Linux box have to take up a gig of disk?!

I've had similar issues. It's the i18n module that is most annoying to me, in that it is listed as a dependency (and so gets downloaded and installed) but isn't really required in a lot of cases. Yes the i18n support is a great thing... but could the packagers at the distros make it a little more optional?

Jedidiah.

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[Anonymous Coward]

open bloatware. It's the new emerging standard. Soon the minimum OS app you can download will be 2.5 GB

Heck look at KDE...

[shudder]

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[Anonymous Coward]

no kidding! I did that too, now i write my papers with the text editor Joe, and open .doc files with Antiword.

160 MB vs 700 kb!

no contest, Joe wins.

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[AJWM]

Why does a office suite on a Linux box have to take up a gig of disk?!

Um, because disk only costs about fifty cents a gig these days? (OK, there's a certain minimum order...)

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[ajs]

So, by that logic, all 800 packages that I have installed shoudl feel free to hog up a gig of disk?! Sorry, no. I'm not going to buy a terabyte of disk just so that gaim can have a full copy of project guttenberg lying around, should it need it some day.

Any single package that takes up that much space is broken, and they can feel free to add as many megabytes of data to their distribution as they like, but many of us will seek alternatives. If we wanted bloatware, we'd be Windows users.

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you do more damage for the open source community's image than good!

"omg m$ programs are so bloated"

"But OpenOffice.org takes far longer to start, is slower, more memory intensive and uses up more disk space"

"stfu m$ sucks buy a bigger hd and faster cpu"

Yeah, way to avoid a severe problem in open source. Let's see you work out the answers for slow boot times, massively bloated desktops, buggy distros releases and pitiful 12-18 months support.

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[AJWM]

OK, I was half kidding on that post.

Problem is that most packages these days drag a ton and a half of baggage around with them, and it's harder to install just the stuff you need than just throw everything in. (I'm not likely to ever need Swahili or Urdu language support, but there it is...)

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Jackass,

Try an experiment instead of complaining.

Step:
1) Open a word doc with tons of images in OO.o and scroll up and down and you will notice all the images will be seen as you go through out the document.
2) No do the same thing in word. Word has to catch up and reload the images and reformat sections of the text to view the same document.

So OO.o takes longer to start up but working on the documents takes a fraction of the load time of images. I rather have a longer initial load of a document then having to constantly wait for a diagram/pic to load under word any day of the week.

Salute

Re:Please hack open office's SIZE

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"Now do the same thing in word. Word has to catch up and reload the images and reformat sections of the text to view the same document."

Wow, thanks. That has been a hassle for me. It seriously disrupts by concentration and thus disturbs my workflow.

Other complaints

[ari_j]

The key bindings do, indeed, suck. But I have much greater concerns.

1. Output is ugly compared even to Word and definitely compared to TeX. When I do a numbered list, the width of the number changes where the text begins, and you end up with a jagged left edge.
2. The help assistant guy comes up and pretends to be Clippit even when you don't have any help files installed, so when you click on him it essentially does a 404.
3. Autocomplete for your words. It's really getting on my nerves and I can't find how to shut it off.

I'm sure I have others that I'm just not thinking of right now.

Re:Other complaints

[richlv]

1. i don't quite follow here, could you give some xample ? (maybe even file an issue at oo.org...)

2. this probably won't be a problem (it seems that help for each component is in it's package, at least in official builds)

3. tools->autocorrect->word completion
(if you had installed help you could search for autocompletion ;) )

Re:Other complaints

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are good issues and I think you should post them under their own thread. The clippy crap and autospell, autoformat are very annoying. I have taken the time to turn them off only to have them reappear under a different context.

There is a fundamental question of how windows-like should these apps be? Is the goal to copy windows? Is the goal to do everything necessary to attract and convert windows users (by making it work-alike), even at the expense of alienating the long term Linux/UNIX users? These same questions apply to GTK and KDE (which I do not use, aside from their inclusion in apps).

I often print XLS and PPT files which do not format correctly. I just accept that these are generally known problems and that they will eventually be fixed.

The keybindings, being more subjective, are another matter. I'm willing to go in and create new emacs bindings again, but I'd really like to see the dev team buy into the concept of "different strokes for different folks". That means making those alternate keybindings a part of the product and making it easy to switch.

Re:Other complaints

[ari_j]

Thanks for the tip on #3. :)

guess how long...

[cyfer2000]

guess how long people will develop a firefox/mozilla extension to view the openoffice.org document directly in firefox/mozilla?

guess how long nvu/mozilla will have the ability to export and import oo.org format?

guess how long a CMS system based on the oo.org format will emerge?

God, I am to busy to write posts to slashdot.org, I don't have any time to do those stuff.

Re:guess how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

----guess how long people will develop a firefox/mozilla extension to view the openoffice.org document directly in firefox/mozilla?

This already exists as an option within OpenOffice. Have tried it and it works well.

Re:guess how long...

[Ash-Fox]

20 minutes.

I wrote a PHP Script to do this

[brandonp]

I wrote a PHP script to do this a while back, here's my post about it:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=79566&cid=70 29 828

It took a OpenOffice Writer file, unzipped it, and replaced specific text with data from my database. It wasn't too difficult, and allowed me to create Template Documents that already had information inside it.

I haven't really used it though, since everyone was happy with PDF files and I use the Pear Class for generating spreadsheets in Excel (http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Wri ter#results) .

I'm sure I'll end up using the script in the future, especially for generating bids, letters, reports, etc.

---
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!

Re:I wrote a PHP Script to do this

[brandonp]

The slashdot Comment link was broken in my last post, it's as follows:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=79566&cid=7029 828---

--
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!

While you're hacking...

[jav1231]

Why not go ahead and fix global changes to all highlighted cells? This is a bug in need of fixing. OTOH, as has been said, it's definitely a plus that this can even be done (re: hacking).

whereas those who *do* understand it

[Superfluid Blob]

reinvent it pretty damn sweetly

Re:whereas those who *do* understand it

[WillAdams]

I dunno. The ideas are interesting, but it's hard to take seriously a typographic tool for which a serious effort isn't made to produce beautiful sample documents.

Where's the Lout equivalent to the TeX Showcase? http://www.tug.org/texshowcase (ob. discl. some stuff from my portfolio is in there).

I mean the pages on the documentation (expert.pdf) don't even balance, it's rife w/ widows and orphans (breaking a two-line paragraph!?!), the index allows a single entry to be carried over to the next page, and the columns don't balance on the last page.

Granted, it's not as egregious as Blatner's book on Quark XPress 6 where he breaks ``didn't'' after the second ``d'' (and complains of the New York Times breaking ``doesn't'' after the ``s'' ``...but it's a newspaper...''), and lots of other typographic faux paus, but it's not encouraging to the person considering using it.

William

Re:whereas those who *do* understand it

[Superfluid Blob]

Well, the guy isn't a typesetting expert, he's a language designer. I daresay once the lout community attracts a larger userbase there will be people capable of producing the kind of stuff in the TeX showcase; right now all I can definitely say is that lout has fitted my particular needs a lot more pleasantly and naturally than TeX has.

Try Arch Linux

[thegnu]

Check out Arch Linux, a distro targeted to 'competent users' that has a wonderful package manager. Dependencies are built into packages. Optional dependencies are usually not listed, and even if they are, you can use the Arch Build System to make your own package from the Arch stock PKGBUILD.

I installed the openoffice package and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't run until I realized I hadn't installed the i18n-en files.

Correction...

[thegnu]

I really meant to hit preview...

What was missing was the openoffice-en package (not i18n-en files... BAD GEEK! BAD!). And I added openoffice-spell-en. I think it's a little under 100MB total? A little bloaty for my tastes, but it is an office suite.

How to include grammar checker?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I check, OOO maintainers are playing the 'we don't need stinking grammar checker' politics on this issue. For the few tools that do (eg: Link Grammar, Queerqueq), they never talk with each other.

Re:How to include grammar checker?

[jonadab]

Grammar checking is AI complete, and all the grammar-checking programs I've
ever seen are worse than useless -- literally: the people who use them end
up with *worse* grammar than the people who don't, because they're wrong
*more* than half the time.

You name any grammar checker you want, and I'll write ten sentences with
one obvious grammatical error each: if the grammar checker finds at least
five of the errors without finding more than five bogus "errors" that are
in fact correct, I'll eat my hat.

It's too technical though...

[youngerpants]

OK, for a living I migrate companies from Microsoft to FOSS, be it migrating servers, databases, directories or MSOffice to OO

My biggest hurdle is convincing people that just because something is "different", its not "hard"... it's just different.

The problem I see here is that an Office Productivity Package should be easy to use; have you ever created a template in MS Office, click an icon. However to create a template in Open Office, you need to hack XML.

THIS is where Open Office (and its use of Open Standards) fails. Users (even power users) are going to have one look at an XML sheet and want to go back to MS.

Yes, XML is the standard, but it should still have a "pretty" GUI for 99% of the people who are going to use it.

Re:It's too technical though...

[thepoch]

Ummm... I've created several templates in Open Office. Basically I design them (mostly spreadsheets). Then I click "File"->"Save As", and then select "OpenOffice.org 1.0 Spreadsheet Template (stc)".

So now when I want to create a spreadsheet with the same styles, look, etc, I just doubleclick the .stc file, and boom, I have a predesigned template. Plus, when I click "File"->"Save", it automatically tries to save a new file. I've tried this several times with Office, and it keeps overwriting my template. I have to click "File"->"Save As" in word for example just so I won't absentmindedly overwrite a difficultly created template.

I didn't read the article so I really have no idea if the templating in OpenOffice you're talking about is different from what I mention... but that's how I, a financial officer, do it.

Re:It's too technical though...

[Ash-Fox]

What the hell are you talking about?

I create weekly new templates for people in openoffice:

Fax headers templates

Letter templates

newsletter templates

webpage templates

accounting templates

And not once, have I even looked at how the document is formatted.

Re:It's too technical though...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Insightful? Its just not true...come on moderators!

Re:It's too technical though...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you open the template, or create an empty document using the template ?

OOo is for the weak [minded]

[Anonymous Coward]

"I fart on this weak, girly article. Real men use AbiWord. Or emacs."

Pfft. Real Men don't use computers, but do it all in their head. And yes, they do speak printer.

Fast Open?

[Doc Ruby]

Every time I try an OOo release, it's too slow on my PIII/850/kernel2.4.24 . Like waiting more than a few seconds for an "Open" dialog to start (sometimes a minute!). Has anyone tweaked the performance under the hood?

Re:Fast Open?

[codepunk]

What do you got 32 MB of ram?

Re:Fast Open?

[Doc Ruby]

128MB RAM / 200GB HD

Re:Fast Open?

[codepunk]

OO is taking 3/4 of your ram just starting up. X windows is eating the rest. I don't consider anything with less than 500MB of ram even usable any longer.

Re:Fast Open?

[Doc Ruby]

Exactly what I'm talking about: I don't consider a 96MB RAM footprint acceptable for a word processor. I'll stick with AbiWord, which takes 10MB. FWIW, XFree86 is using 7MB. Why should I upgrade my RAM to run a different WP, when it's good enough for everything else I do?

Re:Fast Open?

[AJWM]

Buy more RAM. At least to 256M, more is better. (Alas, prices are going up for old style RAM. I'm guessing yours uses what, PC-133?)

Current graphic desktops eat RAM for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (And no, swap space just doesn't do it unless you like waiting.)

Re:Fast Open?

[Doc Ruby]

AbiWord uses 10MB. Maybe I should trim the OOo bloat myself, and offer something that doesn't compete with MS Word in memory consumption as well as format compatibility.

Re:Fast Open?

[Ash-Fox]

Open office is not a word proccessor, it's a office suite.

If you don't use the other stuff, don't install it, the entire package will startup faster, because the only thing in the package then is the word proccessor.

Re:Fast Open?

[Ash-Fox]

Uninstall all the other crap except openoffice write if you only use the word proccessor.

Re:Fast Open?

[Doc Ruby]

It's been a while, but are you saying that if I install the suite, and just want to read an MS-Word doc, that I have to start the entire suite, including spreadsheet etc? But I can install a subset of the suite, just the WP, and start it up, without failing for missing dependencies? Can I just install each component of the suite separately, and use each one independently? Would I be losing any "suite-wide" features? Maybe there's a way to startup just the WP, even if the whole suite is installed.

In any case, my problems came when triggering individual features in the WP, after the whole shebang had started up. I'd select "File:Open", and wait a minute or so for a dialog to appear. That doesn't seem to have much to do with an installed spreadsheet. Though it did seem to be a problem with loading libraries on demand from disk, slowing interactivity of the GUI, rather than preloading the basic libraries at app startup.

Re:Fast Open?

[Ash-Fox]

Pretty much, you're starting up the entire office suite. Now, if you're not using swap memory (paging files), openoffice is pretty fast to open after that. However most people have around 128MB ram, which seems to be extremely unefficient for these kind of things.

Making a simple RSS editor using OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be possible, without perpetual zipping and unzipping to use an XML/RSS file as a datasource, and create a simple and easy RSS editor?

Letter from Spain's Zapatero to France's Chirac.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a hack of source JVM using a very stupid XORing!!!

http://www.rafb.net/paste/results/OqhmkL56.html

customization

[10am-bedtime]

feh, too much work. i'd rather distract myself with emacs.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Google 101

[mrchaotica]

It's easy to find stuff about LaTeX (as opposed to 'latex'); you just have to use the right search terms. For example:

• latex document classes
• latex typesetting
• tex tutorial

And there's no porn or anti-Shrub results in any of them, at least on the first page.

In general, if you're not getting the results you want you need to disambiguate your search by adding additional terms. Just searching for "latex" will get you porn; searching for "latex + [some typesetting-related word]" will get you LaTeX stuff. The same applies for other things; "apple computer" will get you stuff about Macs while "apple fruit" will get you stuff about apples.

On a related note - translating Excel's XML

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi all -
Just thought I'd mention a great site for those who are still stuck with Excel, and who need to somehow programmatically manipulate "bitsy" Excel worksheets, and who must do so **remotely - in a Unix/Linux environment**. So, you can't use any local Windows-based tools.

( By "bitsy", I mean sheets with complex layout - a bit here, some more stuff over there, and so on).

Here are the URLs (and **believe me**, these are worth a visit ... )

http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2004/12/normalize_e xcel.html

http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2005/01/create_exce ls_s.html

If you have a **desperate need** to manipulate/transform/rearrange data in Excel (and you need to do so in Unix/Linux), check out the URLs above. They show how to translate to-and-from Excel's XML format. Awesome stuff!

Re:Oh Come on !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely agreed! :-)
I've just posted a couple of links to a (great!) site which allows you to translate from Excels' XML to something very-easily-usable, manipulate that, then translate back to (shudder) Excel's XML.

Trust me - this site is **great!** -

http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2004/12/normalize_e xcel.html

http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2005/01/create_exce ls_s.html

Here is the Code

[brandonp]

Here is the PHP Class that I've been refering to. It's very basic proof of concept. I'm sure there are many elegant improvements that could be made:

http://brandonpetersen.com/code/Generate_Report.ph ps

Hope this is useful.

Brandon Petersen, http://brandonpetersen.com/
Get Firefox!