[Gllug] [OT] scripting OpenOffice Impress

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 03:33:54PM +0000, Craig Millar wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience of scripting with OpenOffice? We have to
> prepare the occasional powerpoint presentation that consists of several
> hundred stock images. Up until now, some poor mug has had to insert these
> images one after the other and I started wondering if I couldn't automate the
> process, essentially: loop through the images in ascending order and create a
> new page for each one containing the image. If an image is missing, use a
> blank page instead.
> 
> Sounds easy enough on the face of it, but google has deserted me today. I
> can't seem to find an example of something similar to go on. Does anyone have
> any suggestions or resources? Failing that I might just do it in html
> although there will be grumbling if it's not in ppt format.

I've just spent a fun couple of days generating ODT[1] files from a
program.  Basically I dismantled some existing ODT files -- they're
just ZIP files - you can unzip and look at the content.xml file
inside.  Then tried to create interesting files of my own.

It kind of works.

OOo is very unforgiving about errors - it mostly ignores them which
means you need to spend hours looking at the XML to work out exactly
what you forgot to do this time.

Wasn't very impressed with ODF as a format.  It's poorly documented
and very unstructured compared to something like DocBook/XML.  (For
example, titles are just paragraphs styled in large text!!!)

Anyway to get back to the point, you could try something similar
with the presentation files used by OO 2.0.

Rich.

[1] The new OpenDocument Format text files supported by OO 2.0 amongst
others.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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