Formatting documents with OpenOffice.org Writer macros
Around the time OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC was released, I was migrating a small company from Corel WordPerfect to OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org by itself does not support reading or writing WordPerfect files, but a tool called wpd2sxw can convert WordPerfect files to OpenOffice.org format (SXW). After conversion with wpd2sxw, which was rather good but had problems with some formatting features, I applied macros to documents based on different templates to make more than 2,000 converted documents look very similar to original WordPerfect files they were generated from. This article presents some macro "building blocks" you can use to modify a document's formatting or to generate well-formatted documents from plain text files.
Read the article
Today a site called LinuxElectrons posted a story categorizing Sun Microsystems' recent 10k filing as "probably as close as Microsoft can legally get to buying OpenOffice.org." Sun, however, strongly disagrees with this characterization and listed several clarifications for us. In short, it's just not true. The 10K filing, submitted as the result of a landmark, $1.6 billion agreement last April Fool's Day between the two companies, lists three exhibits that deal specifically with the highly publicized Microsoft settlement agreement. The meat of the document states that Microsoft reserves the right to pursue patent infringement claims against OpenOffice.org, but allows for indemnification against such claims against StarOffice. StarOffice is a commercial office suite sold by Sun that is based on the free OpenOffice.org project.
Sun denies report that it is 'selling out' OpenOffice
Ads: