Posts Tagged ‘OpenOffice’

How to: Open Office view / edit .doc , .odt document in Full Screen mode

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

Most programs, like Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Evince etc. etc. have as a default set F11 to bring the program to full screen.  It seems logical that the Linux substitute for Microsoft Office – Open Office should also go full screen while the user press F11, but weirdly it doesn't.

Pressing F11 in Open Office on my current Debian Squeeze (6.0.5) Stable Linux with OpenOffice.org 3 brings to screen Styles and Formatting customization dialog.

openoffice.org 3 debian linux F11 key press Styles and Formatting dialog screenshot

I'm not sure why openoffice is behaving like this, but one of my guess is cause OpenOffice was multiple times upgraded whenever I upgraded my Debian to latest stable with apt-get update && apt-get upgrade thus most likely still some keyboard bindings from older OO versions are affecting it. There are two ways to make OpenOffice display in Full-Screen.

1. Using OO menus

Use View -> Full Screen (F11)

As I said it is possible, the F11 key assignment is still reacting to old config assignment as in dialog for full screen the Shortcut key said to bring OO full-screen is F11.

2. Making OpenOffice FullScreen through keyboard

Keyboard config to bring OpenOffice to Full-Screen mode is a simultaneous key-press of:

CTRL + SHIFT + J

Pressing Ctrl + Shift + J again brings OO to its standard window.

Openoffice / Libreoffice run in full screen screenshot pic Debian squeeze Linux

Though I'm not sure I assume in newer OpenOffice versions now distributed under the LibreOffice name (cause of some Patents and Licensing issues), CTRL + SHIFT + J should bring up LibreOffice in Full-Screen too. I don't have at hand installed version of LibreOffice, so if someone can confirm for sure of Ctrl + Shift + J makes LibreOffice go FullScreen? Please drop comment.

Cheers 😉
 

Create PNG, JPG, GIF pictures / images from PDF on Linux

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

I've received a PDF file with a plan for development of a bundle of projects, My task was to evaluate this plan and give feeback on the 44 pages PDF document.

Since don't know of program to directly be able edit PDF files on GNU / Linux ?, my initial idea was to open and convert the PDF to ODT / DOC with OpenOffice (Libre Office) and then edit the ODT file.
Unfortunately Open Office oowrite program was unable to open / visualize the PDF file. My assumption is OO failure to open the PDF is because the PDF was generated on Microsoft Windows with Adobe illustrator or smth.

The idea that came to my mind as alternative, way to edit the PDF file was to convert it in pictures edit and then convert the pictures to PDF.
In other words to follow these 3 steps:
1. Convert the PDF document to multiple images
2. Edit each of the images with GIMP or Inkscape
3. Convert back all images to a single PDF file

Some time ago, I've written an article how to create PDF file from many image files in JPEG, PNG or GIF on Linux

. This prior article was exactly describing how to complete Step 3.Therefore all left was to find a way to convert the PDF file to multiple JPEG / PNG / GIF images.

convert command to convert PDF document to multiple pictures which you can take from my earlier article is:

$ convert *.jpg outputpdffile.pdf
Actually in Step 1 I was aiming to do the opposite of what I've previously done.

Hence, in order to convert the singe Project.PDF file to multiple PNG images, I just switched convert IN / OUT arguments order.

hipo@noah:~/project-pdf-to-images$ convert Project.pdf Project.png
...

I've done the PDF to pictures conversion on my notebook running Debian Squeeze (6.0.2) GNU / Linux.Convertion of the PDF file to 44 images, took 25 seconds on my dual core 1.8 Ghz / 2GB RAM Thinkpad r61.
Afterwards, I've had at hand 44 PNG files generated, e.g.:

hipo@noah:~/project-pdf-to-images$ ls -al Project-*.png |wc -l
44

convert was also smart enough to produce correct file naming. The output file names were:
Project-1.png
Project-2.png
etc.

Nicely each number (-1.png) was corresponding to the respective PDF page. For instance Project-10.png was corresponding to page 10 of the Projects.PDF file

Rather ironically, after convertion of the PDF to pictures, while opening the Project-1.png, I've noticed The GIMP – (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is capable of directly reading PDF files. GIMP has both the option to open files in layers or separate images 😉
Anyways even if GIMP is used to modify the different PDF pages as layers, once completed GIMP doesn't have the ability to save the file as PDF and therefore once saved the file if merging of layers is done the resulting picture becomes ONE BIG MESS.
Therefore it seems my the 3 steps way e.g.:

1. convertion PDF to pictures
2. picture edit with GIMP or Inkscape
3. convertion of pictures back to PDF

is still the only way to "modify PDF" in Linux or BSDs. I will be glad to hear if someone has come up with a better solution?

 

How to convert any internet Webpage to PDF from command line on GNU/Linux

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Linux webpage html to pdf command line convertor wkhtmltopdf

If you're looking for a command line utility to generate PDF file out of any webpage located online you are looking for Wkhtmltopdf
The conversion of webpages to PDF by the tool is done using Apple's Webkit open source render.
wkhtmltopdf is something very useful for web developers, as some webpages has a requirement to produce dynamically pdfs from a remote website locations.
wkhtmltopdf is shipped with Debian Squeeze 6 and latest Ubuntu Linux versions and still not entered in Fedora and CentOS repositories.

To use wkhtmltopdf on Debian / Ubuntu distros install it via apt;

linux:~# apt-get install wkhtmltodpf
...

Next to convert a webpage of choice use cmd:

linux:~$ wkhtmltopdf www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net_website.pdf
Loading page (1/2)
Printing pages (2/2)
Done

If the web page to be snapshotted in long few pages a few pages PDF will be generated by wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf also supports to create the website snapshot with a specified orientation Landscape / Portrait

-O Portrait options to it, like so:

linux:~$ wkhtmltopdf -O Portrait www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net_website.pdf

wkhtmltopdf has many useful options, here are some of them:
 

  • Javascript disabling – Disable support for javascript for a website
  • Grayscale pdf generation – Generates PDf in Grayscale
  • Low quality pdf generation – Useful to shrink the output size of generated pdf size
  • Set PDF page size – (A4, Letter etc.)
  • Add zoom to the generated pdf content
  • Support for password HTTP authentication
  • Support to use the tool over a proxy
  • Generation of Table of Content based on titles (only in static version)
  • Adding of Header and Footers (only in static version)

To generate an A4 page with wkhtmltopdf:

wkhtmltopdf -s A4 www.pc-freak.net/blog/ www.pc-freak.net_blog.pdf

wkhtmltopdf looks promising but seems a bit buggy still, here is what happened when I tried to create a pdf without setting an A4 page formatting:

linux:$ wkhtmltopdf www.pc-freak.net/blog/ www.pc-freak.net_blog.pdf
Loading page (1/2)
OpenOffice path before fixup is '/usr/lib/openoffice' ] 71%
OpenOffice path is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
OpenOffice path before fixup is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
OpenOffice path is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
Printing pages (2/2)
Done
Printing pages (2/2)
Segmentation fault

Debian and Ubuntu version of wkhtmltopdf does not support TOC generation and Adding headers and footers, to support it one has to download and install the static version of wkhtmltopdf
Using the static version of the tool is also the only option for anyone on Fedora or any other RPM based Linux distro.

Graphical representation of Open Source history generated from SVN and GIT commits with Gource – Software version control visualization

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

A friend of mine has sent me a link to awesome videos produced with an open source tool called Gource

The tool is really awesome as its capable of producing amazing graphical visualizations from source tree repositories obtained from software SVN or GIT repositories

Someone used it to create a wonderful videos and relate the graphical visualization with wondeful music to show graphically the Software development for the main Free Software Projects. 😉

The points which move around in videos are graphical representation of the repository source, the nodes which buzzle around are users who commit source in the project repositories.
The whole graphical representation is being generated based on all the latest source hold inside the software repository, on top of the videos its visible the date of each of the source commits.
Below are few of the nice videos, the rest are available for checkout in Youtube, Enjoy! 😉

OpenOffice Development – Graphical representation

PHP Development – Graphical representation

History of Python development since 1990 with Gource

Development of MySQL 2000-2010 – Graphical representation

Perl development history in less then 4 minutes. Visualized with gource.

Problem with OpenOffice after upgrade on Debian Sid Testing/Unstable – (openoffice.org: Component manager is not available.)

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

A few days ago I did an upgrade using apt-get which upgraded my openoffice to 3.2.04 on my Desktop machine (a notebook running Debian Sid – Testing/Unstable). Since then I haven’t started the openoffice, however today an ex-college colleague of mine (Burcu), drop by home to give her some help about a project. In that relation I had to open a .doc file. I launched my oowriter in an attempt to open the document without success a stupid error poped up saying something is wrong with some kind of Openoffice registry and most importantly claiming the following error:

openoffice.org: Component manager is not available.

First thing I tried in order to resolve the issue was simply moving my ~/.openoffice.org/ and ~/.openoffice-org2/ directories to ~/.openoffice.org-bak/ and respectively ~/.openoffice.org2:

hipo@noah:~$ mv ~/.openoffice.org/ ~/.openoffice.org-bak/
hipo@noah:~$ mv ~/.openoffice.org2/ ~/.openoffice.org2-bak/

Regrettably I realized this this approach failed when I launched the oowriter to regenerate it’s working directories.

Therefore I executed another strategy 🙂 to fix the issue completely reinstalling the openoffice with apt:

hipo@noah:~# apt-get install --reinstall openoffice.org-core

After a while, now all is back to normal with my Openoffice :)Though it’s a real lose of time implying such a dumb workarounds, I always hated linux as a desktop platform just because of misbehaves like that.

12 Must Have Openoffice extensions

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Today I was googling around about tutorial to learn how to make diagrams via openoffice draw and I stumbledupon the following nice tutorial check it out here END—–