Free openoffice software for linux

Groovy For OpenOffice is an OpenOffice Extension that adds support for scripting OpenOffice Macros in Groovy .

Print OpenOffice 2 documents is a service menu that enables the user to right click on an OpenOffice 2 document and print it.

OpenOffice::OODoc::Text is a Perl module for the text processing submodule of OpenOffice::OODoc.

This manual chapter describes the text-oriented methods of OpenOffice::OODoc, implemented by the OpenOffice::OODoc::Text class, and inherited by the OpenOffice::OODoc::Document class.

These methods are not essentially dedicated to string processing; they are more precisely focused on text containers. A text container is a document element which can (and must) be used in order to support a text and integrate it at the right place and according to the right presentation rules. The OpenDocument specification defines a lot of such containers, and the present API supports many of them, such as paragraphs, headings, tables (or spreadsheets), lists, sections, and draw pages. Some of these containers can host other containers: for example, a table contains rows, a row contains cells, a section can contain almost everything including other sections, etc.

These features are text-oriented, but can be used on documents of any class, such as spreadsheets or presentations as well as text documents. So, the Text word doesnt mean that the features described in the present manual chapter are dedicated to OpenOffice.org Writer documents only. In the other hand, a few methods cant apply to any document class (ex: creating or retrieving draw pages makes sense with presentation and drawing documents only).

OODoc::Text should not be explicitly used in an ordinary application, because all its features are available through the OpenOffice::OODoc::Document class, in combination with other features. Practically, the present manual is provided to describe the text-oriented features of OpenOffice::OODoc::Document (knowing that these features are technically supported by the OpenOffice::OODoc::Text component of the API).

The OpenOffice::OODoc::Text class is a specialist derivative of OpenOffice::OODoc::XPath for XML elements which describe the text content of OOo/ODF documents. Here, "text content" means containers that can host text containers (i.e. tables, lists...) as well as flat text.
Knowing that the "styles.xml" member of an OpenOffice.org file can contain text (because some style definitions, such as page headers or footers, can contain text), the presently described features can be used against this member as well as the "content.xml" member.

This module should be used in combination with OpenOffice::OODoc::Styles, via the OpenOffice::OODoc::Document class, if the application has to handle detailed presentation parameters of text elements. This is because such parameters are held in styles elements and not in the text elements themselves, according to the principle of separation of content and presentation which is one of the foundations of the OpenDocument format.

OpenOffice::OODoc::Image is a Perl module for image manipulation methods.

The OpenOffice::OODoc::Image class is a derivative of OpenOffice::OODoc::XPath designed for the manipulation of graphics objects contained in documents. It mainly allows you to modify the size and position of an image and exchange its content outside the document.

This class should not be explictly used in an ordinary application, because all its features are available in the OpenOffice::OODoc::Document class, in combination with other features. So, each time an application needs to get an image-focused access to a document, it should use the general ooDocument() constructor instead of the ooImage() one.

Practically, the present manual is provided to describe the image-container processing features of OpenOffice::OODoc::Document (knowing that these features are technically supported by the OpenOffice::OODoc::Image component of the API).

Knowing that an image is displayed or printed according to a style, the OpenOffice::OODoc::Image features should be used in conjunction with the OpenOffice::OODoc::Styles ones. The OpenOffice::OODoc::Document class allows the user to invoke text-, style- and image-focused methods from the same object.

All the methods described here can equally be used with images contained in style sheets (headers, footers) as with images contained in the body of a document. It can therefore be associated just as well with a "styles.xml" member as with a "content.xml" member of an OpenOffice.org file.

This class works with all types of document (text, presentation, etc.).

For all methods where the first argument is given below as "image", it is (unless otherwise stated) either the name of an image as it appears to the end user when editing its properties in OpenOffice.org or StarOffice or the images element reference obtained previously by the program. All these methods fail and return a null value (or in some cases produce an error message) if the argument does not correspond to a known image contained in the document.

Note: This module is not an image-processing tool. It can insert or remove images, and control the way the images are displayed in the documents. But it cant process the images themselves.

OpenOffice::OODoc::Styles is a Perl module for document styles and layout processing.

This class is designed to handle styles, whether automatic or named, contained in styles.xml or content.xml. It inherits from the common OpenOffice::OODoc::XPath class and brings style-focused features.

This class should not be explicitly used in an ordinary application, because all its features are available in the OpenOffice::OODoc::Document class, in combination with other features. Practically, the present manual is provided to describe the style processing features of OpenOffice::OODoc::Document (knowing that these features are technically supported by the OpenOffice::OODoc::Styles component of the API).

Remember that named styles are those that the end user can see and edit using the Stylist tool in OpenOffice.org. Such styles usually have meaningful names and are stored in the styles.xml member. But an OpenDocument-compliant style may own two names, so-called name and display-name. The display-name is the name as its displayed by the office software, while the name is the main identifier. Both are displayable character strings, but they often differ. For a given display-name, the application software is allowed to set any arbitrary name. For example, with OpenOffice.org 2, the well-known pre-defined style whose display name is "Text body" is named "Text_20_body" (the space character is replaced by its hexadecimal value between two "_" characters). In the other hand, the name and the display-name generally dont differ when they contain letters and/or digits only. Remember that the name (and not the display-name) is the main identifier of a style element. So, such a method as getStyleElement("style name") uses the name attribute to retrieve a style descriptor (unless you change this behaviour through the retrieve_by document property).

Care should be taken particularly with predefined base styles in OpenOffice.org. These styles are described in styles.xml just like named styles, but they appear to the end user with localised names (in their local language), so the really displayed style name is neither the name nor the display-name stored attributes. For example, in the French distribution of OpenOffice.org, the "Text body" style appears as "Corps de texte", while its "display-name" is "Text body" and its "name" is "Text_20_body". However, this is not a problem for user-defined styles as the stored display-name is exactly the same as the effective display name.

There are also numerous "automatic" styles in a document which are created implicitly by the office application each time a particular set of presentation attributes is given to an element, but where no named style is referenced. Automatic styles which apply to the document body are stored in content.xml (but in an XML element isolated from the content). An automatic styles name can change randomly each time the document is edited or saved in OpenOffice.org.

Applications which access automatic styles will not want to indicate them using "hard-coded" names. The best way is to retrieve each automatic style via an object that is known to use it. Using a "hard-coded" name is all right for styles created by a program (the createStyle() method requires it), but such a name should only be considered to be stable for the duration of the session. If you want a program-created style name to be then respected by OpenOffice.org, you must create it as a named style.

This is no more complicated, but it is better to avoid making hundreds of styles visible to the user that they do not need to see.
There are some structural differences between the old OpenOffice.org 1.0 format and the new OASIS Open Document (ODF) one. A few of these differences arent made fully transparent by OpenOffice::OODoc. So, in some cases, a program including style definitions or updates doesnt produce exactly the same results with both OOo 1 and OOo 2 documents.

Some styles are more complex than others as they describe the page layout. These styles can themselves contain text and images. A page style, or a "master page", can actually define a header, a footer, margins, and a background. Headers and footers can contain text and images which can otherwise be handled by OODoc::Text and OODoc::Image. A background contains a colour and can also include a background image (several methods are possible).
Presentation of these objects is itself controlled by styles.

All of this leads to the conclusion that it is not enough just to associate each content element with a style. In reality, document styles form a rather complex network of interdependencies.
As for page styles, the OpenOffice.org format contains a concept which must be understood in order to use some of the following methods. By virtue of the principle of separation of content and presentation, the definition of a page style is based on two distinct objects: "master page" and "page layout". A "master page" object encompasses any page style content (i.e. the content of headers and footers) and links to a "page layout" object which describes page presentation characteristics (with large numbers of parameters from page dimensions to background colour to footnote separator size, etc.). Names which appear in the list of page styles in OpenOffice.org are actually names of "master pages". However, to work with physical aspects of the presentation, you have to access the associated "page layout".

To complicate matters, there are also header and footer styles. Each object contained in a header or footer (e.g. paragraph or image) has a style. The number and range of styles are much larger that you would imagine just looking at the Stylist tool in OpenOffice.org. Up to a point, OODoc::Styles methods make life easier for you by masking some of this complexity.
In OODoc::Styles methods, styles are normally indicated by their logical names (which must be unique), but, except where otherwise stated, they can also be indicated by their style element reference. Moreover, when a method is expecting a page layout as an argument but the programmer passes it a master page instead (whether by design or by mistake), it "knows" in most cases how to automatically select the associated page layout.

Defining a style requires a great many attributes. Some appear in code examples in this manual, but for a full list of possible attributes for each style, you must refer to the OpenOffice.org specification or publications derived from it.

OODoc::Styles module is designed to allow applications to manipulate any style and even create new ones. It is not recommended, however, to use it to create a presentation entirely from code. Here again, it is better to start from document templates which already contain at least a blank of each required style.

Template::Provider::OpenOffice is a OpenOffice (ODT) Provider for Template Toolkit.

This module extends Template::Provider to automatically extract the content.xml file from an OpenOffice zip file and run it through Template::Toolkit for processing.

We use OpenOffice::OODoc to actually open the document and extract the content.xml file. This gives us the benefit of having the methods available to add/subtract files in addition to parsing and processing the content file if we want to do some custom work in addition to templating.