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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."
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.
Real man uses [La]TeX!
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.
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...)
-- Alastair
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.
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make install -not war