[LINK] RFI: OpenOffice and Web-Page Management

[Carl Makin]

At 09:27  7/11/02 +1100, Roger Clarke wrote:
 
>I'm finally getting around to looking at OpenOffice (in my case, maybe for 
>MacOS 9.1, but more likely for Max OSX from early 2003; but the question 
 .
 .
>I'd of course like to use OpenOffice as my habitat, such that I can 
>deliver from one source-file a range of formats:
>-   XML (okay, so that's native, and the DTD is public, right?)

Yes the DTD is public.

>-   HTML (3.2, say, for the present, workaday world)
>-   XHTML (or is that superfluous since the native is XML anyway?)

No, XHTML and the native XML save format are different and browsers will
not natively read OO's XML (which is what I think you're after).

>-   PDF

OO uses a converter such as ghostscript to do this.

>-   RTF 1.2, as the preferred compatibility-with-Wintel-people mode
>-   Word 6, as a fallback compatibility mode
>-   Word 97 and later abominations ('cos contracts sometimes require it).

These all work very well. :)

>Does anyone know where OpenOffice is up to on such matters?

Not there yet on the Mac unfortunately.  When OpenOffice does come to
the Mac, it will be MacOS X only.

The best conversion tool I have found so far for MacOS 8/9 is Appleworks
6 with the MacLink translators.  It produces clear simple HTML suitable
for cutting and pasting into a web page and does the other formats quite
well.  PDF generation can be done using a third party program called
'PDF ePrinter' which puts a printer in the chooser that spits out PDFs. 
That works quite well.

On MacOS X I still use Appleworks 6 for most of my conversion work, even
though I have Office X and I even prefer Appleworks for writing
documents over Word, although I only write simple documents in a
wordprocessor and move to DocBook under FreeBSD for more complex ones.


Carl.