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);

Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be XSLT, not XSTL.

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: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.

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!