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);

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
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