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OPENOFFICE.ORG NEWSLETTER
Volume 05 - Issue 11 - 05/2008
Please send news clippings to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Contents
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1. Announcements
================
* Call for Papers for OOoCon 2008 Started
* OpenOffice.org 3 beta is ready for testing
* Announcing the Sun Presenter Console
* More than 100 OpenOffice.org Extensions Available
* OUT NOW!! - The first public version of ODFDOM
* OpenOffice.org builds for Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T)
2. Success Stories
==================
* Survey: Strong Use of Open Source Desktop Applications
* German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Deploys StarOffice
3. Featured News
================
* Reminder: "A maximum total of $175,000 USD may be awarded"
* OpenOffice.org QA weekend in Essen, Germany
* OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Feedback
* Aqua's Beta: we're listening
* Strong Presence of OpenOffice.org at LinuxTag Berlin
4. Tips & Tricks
================
* New Blog about ODF Development Tools
* Groovy For OpenOffice.org
* Updating XSLT based filters – enhancing XHTML export
5. ODF News
===========
* Huge Success for the ODF Community
* ODF Validation for Dummies
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Want to help OpenOffice.org? Find out hot to contribute or see our
To Do List!!
http://contributing.openoffice.org/index.html
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/To-Dos/index.html
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Announcements
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Call for Papers for OOoCon 2008 Started
=======================================
"OOoCon 2008 - to be held in Beijing, China from 5th-7th November - will
see the biggest concentration of OOo developers ever assembled in one
location on this planet. For this reason, we particularly welcome
proposals from developers with information to share with fellow
developers, from how to get started with simple extensions, through to the
deep, dirty, and downright technical aspects of hacking the OpenOffice.org
codebase.
Papers are also welcomed on any topic of interest to the Community: to the
thousands of people who have joined one of our Projects and design,
develop, maintain, translate, test, document, support, promote, or in any
other way help us bring OpenOffice.org's products and services to the
world. As this is the first OOoCon to be held in Asia, we encourage local
communities to submit papers for a special feature on local success
stories.
For further details of how, where, and when to submit a proposal:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/cfp";
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=360
OpenOffice.org 3 beta is ready for testing
==========================================
"OpenOffice.org 3 beta is immediately available in US English for
MS-Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and OpenSolaris platforms from
http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta. This page also contains details
of where to find localized builds and language packs as they become
available. For more details, please consult the appropriate native
language project - see http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html";
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=361
Announcing the Sun Presenter Console
====================================
"I would like to announce the public availability of the Sun Presenter
Console (beta), previously known as Presenter Screen, previously known
as Presenter View.
The Presenter Console extension supports presenters by showing
information that is not visible to the audience. A typical environment
would be a laptop showing the Presenter Console and a connected beamer
showing the actual presentation to the audience. Initially the
Presenter Console extension shows a live preview of the current slide,
a preview of the next slide and tool bar with navigational buttons
and the current and elapsed time:"
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/announcing_the_sun_presenter_console
More than 100 OpenOffice.org Extensions Available
=================================================
"Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA - News), the leading Open Source
company, and the OpenOffice.org(TM) community today announced the
availability of more than 100 extensions in the OpenOffice.org Extension
Repository with the most popular ones achieving downloads of more
than 200,000. Extensions are additional components downloaded on top of
an existing OpenOffice.org installation to add extra features,
templates, languages and dictionaries to the software.
Created through worldwide community collaboration, the OpenOffice.org
Extension Repository includes template packs, a report designer, tools
for professional writers, translation, presentation compression
functionality and more. Two new OpenOffice.org 3.0 features,
highlighted on the product roadmap and expected to be released as
extensions within weeks are the Sun Presenter Console and the
Sun PDF Import Extension. The Sun Presenter Console extension is
available now to preview from the extension repository. It allows
users to view their speaker notes, the next slide and the time on
their laptop screens while presenting via a connected projector.
The Sun PDF Import Extension allows users to edit PDF files."
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080529/20080529005946.html?.v=1
OUT NOW!! - The first public version of ODFDOM
==============================================
"I am pleased to announce that the first public version of ODFDOM is
now available for download.
ODFDOM is the new opensource (LGPLv3), multi-layered, lightweight,
OpenDocument centric API with a Java 5 reference implementation.
For a quick review we offer you an online JavaDoc documentation and
the wiki. For deeper analysis we have uploaded several packages:
* The zipped JavaDoc API
* The JAR of the reference Java 5 implementation
* The zipped NetBeans package containing the sources of ODFDOM v0.6.
The version number 0.6 was chosen as we believe that although there
is still some work towards a full version, already more than half of
the way towards it was managed.
Even with its 0.6 version, ODFDOM is more than a successful prototype,
which tests new concepts like the typed DOM code generation from the
RelaxNG schema of OpenDocument 1.1. Moreover it is the living successor
of AODL and Odf4j, co-evolved from their creators and already matured
by countless development cycles within more than a year development
within Sun."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/out_now_the_first_public
OpenOffice.org builds for Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T)
=================================================
Starting with milestone DEV300 m11, Sun (Hamburg) release engineering
will regularly build OpenOffice.org for the Linux x64 (aka AMD64,
aka EM64T) platform with every new milestone. We have promised this
a long time ago, I'm glad that it finally happened. The main purpose
is, naturally, to find 64 bit specific build- and obvious runtime
problems during the initial milestone build and "smoke test".
This should hopefully ease the burden of the maintainers of the
OOo 64 bit ports.
We plan to publish 64 bit Linux OOo installation sets with one of
the next DEV300 developer snapshots. Many thanks go to the original
porters, Caolan, Jan (Kendy), MartinK, Pavel, Stefan and others who
did great work here.
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/openoffice_org_builds_for_linux
Success Stories
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Survey: Strong Use of Open Source Desktop Applications
======================================================
"That's no longer the case, according to a survey of IT and business
executives and managers, conducted in late April 2008 by CIO.com.
The survey, collecting data from 328 respondents, showed that more than
half the respondents (53 percent) are using open-source applications in
their organization today, and an additional 10 percent plan to do so in
the next year. For nearly half, 44 percent, open-source applications
are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the
acquisition process.
Among those currently employing open-source solutions, the primary uses
are operating systems such as Linux (78 percent), infrastructure
applications, such as back-end databases and Web servers (74 percent),
and software development tools like Eclipse (61 percent).
Those may sound fairly geeky, but business application use isn't far
behind. Nearly half of the survey respondents, 45 percent, are using
desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, and 29 percent use
open-source enterprise applications. The most popular of those
enterprise applications are collaboration tools, customer relationship
management (CRM) tools and ERP applications."
http://www.cio.com/article/375916/Open_Source_is_Entering_the_Enterprise_Mainstream_Survey_Shows
German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Deploys StarOffice
=======================================================================
"According to this German article, the German Federal Office for
Information Security (BSI) is switching to StarOffice for all 500 desktop
PCs. 90% of the BSI employees have already gone through the migration.
Another great success story for ODF!"
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/german_federal_office_for_information
Featured News
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Reminder: A maximum total of $175,000 USD may be awarded
========================================================
This is just another short reminder that the OpenOffice.org Community
Innovation Program is still accepting projects and that a
maximum total of $175,000 USD may be awarded. Thus, check out the
links below for ideas and background information and submit your
project!
http://development.openoffice.org/community_innovation_program.html
http://contributing.openoffice.org/programming.html
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/To-Dos
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2008/proposals
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi (query for high votes)
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice_NetBeans_Integration
OpenOffice.org QA weekend in Essen, Germany
===========================================
"I'm back from the QA weekend in Essen, Germany. The meeting took place
at the "Linux Hotel" - Villa Vogelsang and it was coordinated by a team
from the "OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V.". There were about
18 participants from Germany, Swizerland, the Netherlands and
from Mongolia.
Most people came on Friday afternoon and in the evening we had
a barbecue and we had a lot of fun... On Saturday morning Jacqueline
Rahemipour and André Schnabel started with a tract about the current
translation process and how it is seen by the German community.
Then Stefan Baltzer and I talked about the mission and dependencies
of QA work within the project. Topics like "compliance of deadlines"
and how it relates to QA work or if checks of already integrated issue
fixes having the state "verified/fixed" help to identify potential
problems of the integration process of child workspaces were discussed.
Then we talked about creating synergies between the QA teams of
OpenOffice.org native language teams. We discussed that it might be
relevant that contact persons of different native language QA teams
are published on the QA web page to be able to ask for advice.
After a lunch break Cor Nouws from the Dutch native language team
informed us how QA work in the Netherlands is coordinated and he
talked about other activities in the Netherlands like an
"OpenOffice.org Café" that will be started as an event in a town
near the Belgian border in June 2008. Then Badral Sanligiin
representing the Mongolian community talked about his work on
translating OpenOffice.org into the Mongolian language.
..."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/openoffice_org_qa_weekend_in
OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Feedback
================================
"The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads,
even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds
you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece.
Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface,
OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua
application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts
working (mostly - hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave
in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.
...
I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together,
making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share
docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new
collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.
...
Some features spread across the individual components and others were
just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF
export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the
OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based
on the spreadsheet tab names."
"Just a few words here... The Openoffice Aqua is still only an alpha
version, - not even a beta.:-)
but when this said, I can only say that the last build of OpenOffice 3.0
Aqua is running very, very stable on both OS X 10.4.11PPC/10.5.2PPC as
well as on a MacPro with both 10.4.11 and 10.5.2.
It is more that three times as fast as NeoOffice and more than twice as
fast than both MSOffice 2004 and 2008! - And until now i haven't had a
single 'unexpected quit' with the last two builds of OOo3.0. - Also the
fonts handling is quite a lot better than in NeoOffice and MSO2004/2008.
- I have apprx. 1550 fonts active in my main set, and apprx. 23.000
fonts on the HD - all 100% managed by Linotype Fontexplorer.
So now printing with quite a lot of various fonts and various typefaces
within the same font is just like a dream, though the OOo crew still
tells us that printing can be a problem.:-)
So what can't we expect, when first OpenOffice 3.0 Final is released?
- Mmmmm.... I can hardly wait.:-)"
"I've been using the beta version of Open Office 3 for a week now and
am quite impressed. It is a Mac-native build that doesn't require X11.
It seems quite stable and noticeably faster than NeoOffice and Office 2008.
There's no Entourage equivalent but an interesting database component.
The spreadsheet and presentation components seem more or less equivalent
to Office. And OO does have a pretty robust macro system built in.
The database component isn't really a complete db in and of itself,
rather a front end that connects to database servers like MySQL. As such
it requires a bit more technical savvy than the average user is likely
to have, but opens interesting possibilities for custom database
management.
Import and export of OO and Office files is very good. I'm worked with
some heavily formatted Word files and a reasonably complex Excel
spreadsheet. OO maintained the formatting and formulas better than
iWork 08.
OO has a seemingly deep built in help system that provides on-hover
pop up boxes that explain extra functionality.
As an open source project the fit and finish are not up to Microsoft
standards let alone Apple's, but OO is not butt ugly either.
My biggest quibble is that scrolling with a scroll wheel is slow,
even on 5 page Writer documents. Also the conversion between
Windows/Linux conventions isn't complete. When mousing over an
embedded hyperlink, OO instructed me to "Ctrl-click" on the link to
open it in my browser. Oops. With a Mac that's Cmd (command)-click.
(I did submit a bug ticket)
Still, I'm very impressed with the first public release beta of OO
for OS X. It is both faster and more stable than the Office 08 demo
I tried out. Since I'm not working in a corporate setting and don't
need absolute compatibility with Microsoft, I see no reason to
purchase Office 2008 for an Intel native office suite.
The presentation module isn't near as slick as Keynote but the word
processing and spreadsheets are more capable than Pages and Numbers.
If you need that extra functionality then give OO a try."
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/another_cool_openoffice_org_review
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/more_openoffice_org_3_0
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/cool_openoffice_org_3_0
Aqua's Beta: we're listening
============================
The feedback we got for the Aqua port of OpenOffice.org 3 Beta was
extremely encouraging. This is very motivating. Thank you!
There was some constructive criticisms about some aspects of the port
too. I'm happy to note that many of the issues are already solved in
two developer's child workspaces (aquavcl07 and aquabmpfix01):
keyboard handling, graphics performance and some visual details
will improve considerably soon in one of the next regular
development snapshots.
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/aqua_s_beta_we_re
Strong Presence of OpenOffice.org at LinuxTag Berlin
====================================================
OpenOffice.org had a very strong presence at the LinuxTag event in
Berlin this year. In the exhibition area OpenOffice.org was shown
at two locations, at the OpenOffice.org community booth and
at the OpenOffice.org pod at the Sun booth. Most people wanted to
see the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.0. In particular most
visitors wanted to take a peek at the upcoming PDF import extension
or the already available beta of the Sun Presenter Console.
Another LinuxTag highlight was the two-day OpenOffice.org workshop
that was initiated and organized by the German OpenOffice.org community
and staffed with speakers from both Sun and the volunteer community.
All OpenOffice.org sessions seemed to be well attended with attendees
asking many questions. Thus, the popularity of OpenOffice.org at
LinuxTag Berlin is just another proof point for the growing
interest in the multi-platform open source office suite.
Tips & Tricks
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New Blog about ODF Development Tools
====================================
"J. David Eisenberg, the author of the online book "OASIS OpenDocument
Essentials", just started a cool new blog about ODF development tools.
I'm looking forward to all the articles!"
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/new_blog_about_odf_development
Groovy For OpenOffice.org
=========================
Cool! With it's now even possible to use Groovy for OpenOffice.org
programming. The website says: "Groovy For OpenOffice is an OpenOffice
Extension that adds support for scripting OpenOffice Macros in Groovy".
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/groovy_for_openoffice_org
Useful MySQL / OpenOffice.org Tutorial
======================================
"Of course, I do not want to suggest that MySQL "...is a Desktop
Database", because it's not. Rather, MySQL is a general-purpose
database, so there's no reason at all to dismiss it for typical
"Desktop Database" purposes.
Even though MySQL is a server product, MySQL resembles a typical
Desktop Database in a number of ways. For example, MySQL is not
extravagantly resource-hungry, and does not require much maintenance
- (not for this purpose anyway). So, there's not much against using
MySQL here.
In fact, it's probably a good idea to back your Desktop Database
applications with MySQL. A lot of the typical problems (resource
contention due to locking, file corruption due to crashing application
programs, scale limits, and much much more) that you encounter as
these applications grow larger, are either not-existent or easily
solved using a server solution such as MySQL.
So - let's dive in, and see what it takes to use MySQL in the daily
office. Oh yeah - I once did a write-up on connecting MS Access and
MySQL. This time, we won't be using MS Office at all. We'll use
OpenOffice.org instead."
http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/2006/12/mysql-meets-openofficeorg.html
Updating XSLT based filters – enhancing XHTML export
====================================================
"Svante Schubert (Co-lead XML project) has finished an update for the
XHTML export filter. It was the 14th of April where the CWS arrived
ready for QA-status. In the meanwhile Svante and Mathias Bauer also
have discussed about updating the XSLT based filters via an extension
[issue 88270] to be independent from update cycles of the whole office
application. So the iTeam decided to expand the scope of the
CWS DEV300/xsltfilter09 and I am really happy that we have done that.
One week later – 21st of April – the CWS was again ready for QA and
with the integration of the CWS xsltfilter09 to the DEV300 master
workspace the OpenOffice.org will get some really great enhancements
for the XHTML export and also the other XSLT based filters
(e.g. DocBook XML):
* change of the default extension for the XHTML export from .xhtml to
.html
- with that change the Internet Explorer is able to load the exported
XHTML documents of OOo [issue 85268]
* Footnotes are now supported also in XHTML export [issue 34424]
* Field values are now supported in XHTML export [issue 75125]
* Export of headings greater six now according to XHTML specification
[issue 80679]
Great work Mathias and Svante!"
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/updating_xslt_based_filters_enhancing
ODF News
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Huge Success for the ODF Community
==================================
"First, I warmly welcome Microsoft to the community of ODF supporters.
As most of you will have noticed by now, Microsoft just announced that
they will start supporting ODF out of the box with Service Pack 2 for
Microsoft Office 2007. My favorite statement from the Microsoft
announcement is the following promise: "It will also allow customers
to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007." Thus, very soon
it should be very easy for organizations to standardize their document
workflows on ODF, because the "average employee" does not need any
special skills for saving to ODF anymore. Very cool!"
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/huge_success_for_the_odf
ODF Validation for Dummies
==========================
"First start with an ODF document. When Alex tested OOXML, he used the
Ecma-376 OOXML specification. Let's do the analogous test and validate
the ODF 1.0 text. You can download it from the OASIS ODF web site.
You'll want this version of the text, ODF 1.0 (second edition), which
is the source document for the ISO version of ODF.
You'll also want to download the Relax NG schema files for OASIS
ODF 1.0, which you can download in two pieces: the main schema, and
the manifest schema.
Next you'll need to get a Relax NG validator. Alex recommends James
Clark's jing, so we'll use that. I downloaded jing-20030619.zip the
main distribution for use with the Java Runtime Environment. Unzip
that to a directory and we're almost there.
Since jing operates on XML files and knows nothing about the Zip package
structure of an ODF file, you'll need to extract the XML contents of
the ODF file. There are many ways to do this. My preference, on Windows,
is to associate WinZip with the ODF file extensions (ODT, ODS and ODP)
so I can right-click on these files unzip them. When you unzip you will
have the following XML files, along with directories for images files
and other non-XML resources you can ignore:
* content.xml
* styles.xml
* meta.xml
* settings.xml
* META-INF/manifest.xml
So now we're ready to validate!"
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/odf-validation-for-dummies.html
Newsletter Archive
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Past issues of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter can be found in the archive
of the announce mailing list:
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=announce
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