Slashdot Mirror
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 a lot you can do with xsltproc and unzip - but xsltproc is way to neat to call it a hack.1 0/perl/perl.html
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/
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);
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?
-Teiresias
That should be XSLT, not XSTL.
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.
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
The Army reading list
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Real man uses [La]TeX!
No... real men use Notepad!
Quoth the server, "404."
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 wrote a PHP script to do this a while back, here's my post about it:
0 29 828
i ter#results) .
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=79566&cid=7
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_Wr
I'm sure I'll end up using the script in the future, especially for generating bids, letters, reports, etc.
---
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!
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.
Hi all -
... )
e xcel.html
e ls_s.html
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_
http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2005/01/create_exc
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!
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.
--
make install -not war