Printer-Hostile Web Pages? OpenOffice.org To The Rescue

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:50:33 GMT

A while back (840 days ago, to be exact) I blogged about the NVU HTML authoring tool and its use in reformatting and printing printer-hostile web pages.

Well, NVU 1.0 was released in June 2005. And I have been using it to good effect. However, for some reason, NVU development stopped, and the download site still shows a binary for Fedora Core 3, even though the current version of Fedora Core is FC6. And I couldn't find NVU in FC6's own yum repository. I could download the distribution-agnostic version, but that would mean I have to untar it and then create a launcher icon for it by myself. It's no big deal, but like recompiling Linux kernels (which I did back in the pre-1.0 days), it gets old really fast.

So, I'm looking for an easier way. Just by luck, I clicked on the OpenOffice.org Writer icon on my quick launch bar, which has always been there since the pre-Fedora days, and pasted some random HTML into it. And guess what? It took it.

So until every web site out there becomes printer-friendly, I'll be using OpenOffice.org Writer to compensate. Here's OOo Writer in action, formatting this page:

Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 02:53:47 GMT

I still remember the early days of Star Office. It wasn't Free Software back then. It has its own "desktop," left nav tree, and file open dialog box that doesn't work quit the way you expected. But it has one thing going for it—it can open Microsoft Word documents.

Sun bought Star Office, made it Free Software with a new name OpenOffice.org, and kept working on it. Yesterday, they released OpenOffice.org 2.0. I grabbed a copy and installed it on my work machine.

I've been forced to use OpenOffice.org at work for a year and a half (OCI won't buy me a copy of MS Office) and it worked out well. I can read, write and print MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents just fine.

The 2.0 release prompted me to reflect on the choice between MS Office and OpenOffice.org. And I see a lot of reasons to go with OpenOffice.org. Here's some of them

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is Free Software. It won't hurt you to just install it, even if you later also install MS Office
OpenOffice.org 2.0 understands more file formats than MS Office. You can open an MS Word document in OpenOffice.org, but you cannot open an OpenOffice.org Writer document in MS Office
OpenOffice.org 2.0 works on many platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and more while MS Office only works on two: Windows and Mac
OpenOffice.org 2.0 file formats are open and standardized. This ensures the long term viability of documents
OpenOffice.org 2.0 generates PDF files from its documents, spreadsheets and presentations for easier sharing
OpenOffice.org 2.0 contains a new database module, not unlike MS Access, that is based on the pure Java database engine HSQLDB and allows users to create form based applications and reports based on the data
OpenOffice.org 2.0's document format, OpenDocument, itself an industry standard, is being adopted as "standards" by huge organizations, like the U.S. state of Massachusetts. They are already posting *.odt formatted documents on the web

Of course, not everyone can migrate to OpenOffice.org 2.0 right away. Reasons to keep on using MS Office:

You are a heavy MS Office user and just don't feel like learning a new thing all over again
You are in an environment where MS Office is the standard and it would take five years to change that
MS Office formatted document is the end product of your work and the fidelity requirements are high (particular fonts, etc.)
You simply like the feeling of paying Microsoft money (or make your employer pay just to highlight your importance)

Weiqi Gao's Observations - openoffice.org tag

Printer-Hostile Web Pages? OpenOffice.org To The Rescue

Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0