[Sussex] Fun things to do with Open Office when your bored.

[nik at wired4life.org]

Okay, a little proof of concept....

Build a Document, lets say... Example.sxw

save that document , with some clear text to replace.....

	<? This was sample text ?>

now unzip that document.....

	unzip Example.sxw

Edit and replace the sample text stored within content.xml , note that the symbol set has been
transposed to something else...


	'&lt;? Sample Text to replace ?&gt;'

	'This was some sample text that was then replaced.i'

Recreate the document.

	zip -r Example.sxw ./*

then print to the printer called Office...

	oowriter -P OFFICE ./Example.sxw


Now I gotta admit, thats a whole lot of POTENTIAL for what can be done,
using just that feature.

Since it is now possible to build schedules and create flexible
documents....


this is something that you just currently cannot do in Word, until the
new XML schema comes out.


So I want to be able to build invoices, salesheets and general office
automation, I want to do it away from the users allowing them to simply
build documents which contain paragraphs, whose style identifies how to
replace the text included. Now users can create letters once, drop them
into a directory and see them printed on a range of environments or
output to files or saves as completely new files with the content
included.

Whats great is that I can do a MailMerge of a new document, creating a
new document and I can do the whole thing by just amending the
content.xml and creatnig a new zip file. 

now if I could just access the openoffice -> pdf functions on
commandline rather than through oowriter then I could speed the whole
process right up.

Its all still Kinda cool though.




-- 
nik at wired4life.org	http://www.wired4life.org/	Wired4Life, an Answer.


From: Michael Wolf
You know what seems odd to me? Numbers that aren't divisible by two."