Thursday Aug 27, 2009

Metadata and the Semantic Web

Today I've got an automated e-mail from a software called "Link Manager", telling me that a hyperlink inside one of the books I've published on docs.sun.com isn't valid any more and should be replaced or removed.

This is a nice and welcome service, provided by an external (external to my book text) program. I had to register the book right before publishing, so the Link Manager software did know about the book and the hyperlinks within the text.

Now, there are millions of text documents, online and offline, published on the web or in an intranet, or not published at all, and they all contain information that needs to be kept up to date. Wouldn't it be good to have a type of Link Manager service built into every document? A function that automatically cares for all the information inside your text documents?

How often did you think, while writing a paragraph: "This reference certainly will expire some day, so I must come back here regularly and have a look."

Or you might have a comparison chart with data that will be different in some years, still you want to publish the chart now and not be forced to update it manually ever so often.

And the "Link Manager" service can be valuable far beyond caring for hyperlinks. How often do you write a paragraph and think: "Here I must ask person ABC if this is really right, and there I will insert an image of XYZ as soon as I get one that is free to use", and so on.

Currently, you can insert a note into your text, but this doesn't look good, and it is of no big help if your documents contain many thousand notes. What we need is a method of attaching additional structured information to any text. Information that is visible to tools software, or by request of the user, but that is normally hidden from the human reader.

For a hyperlink in your text, you would need additional information about date and time of insertion, date and time of next validation, may be alternative link to be used in case the original expired, source of the information, may be copyright information and license, author contact information, and much more.

With all these information, it would be possible to have some software tool scanning your documents regularly, checking if everything is OK, changing what is allowed to be changed automatically, or reporting problems to your attention.

Of course, those methods only work on open standard formatted documents, as ODF, and the meta data must be attached following an open standard, too.

Fortunately, such open standards exist. The meta data format is proposed by OASIS.

If you are into technical writing, publishing documentations, you will need standardized metadata in your documents. Every document should have a feedback link, and creation data, page count, copyright information, and more. In Writer, just click Tools > Bibliography Database to see how you can input and edit metadata today. The method used in OpenOffice.org to link to the bibliography database was just a very first step, using proven and available technology, on the road to real RDF metadata. Entering and editing metadata will certainly be more comfortable later.

Many software visionaries and engineers are working on metadata standards, for example using Dublin Core technology, or other developments as in SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System).

The OpenOffice.org software is already prepared for meta data, see the Blog entry by Svante Schubert and the presentation he held at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 in Barcelona.

So, OpenOffice.org is prepared to handle meta data in open standard documents, as proposed in the RDF specification.

As you can see from the comments to Svante's blog, the meta data support is a hot topic. Be prepared to meet some dragons here.

This is because there is enormous potential with metadata. Clever designed metadata can transform your text documents, spreadsheets, presentations into almost everything. Using metadata and special metadata aware hardware and software, your web based documents can be used to automate almost every aspect of your reader's life. The automatic programming of video recorders is just the least intrusive effect. A multitude of services can be developed to build upon the metadata, and the financial aspects might look like the next virtual gold rush.

Time will tell. Click the Semantic Web logo to read more about the future of the web.

W3C Semantic Web Logo

A nice magazine article by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor of the World Wide Web", and others is here. By the way, that old magazine text shows the need of more intelligent link managers: It names an URL of a web page that contains some meta tags, but if you browse to that URL, you find that this page meanwhile got changed by its owner. It's a pity: The owner had no metadata tag sticked automatically onto his web page reminding him that the URL is used in an example about meta tags. In a perfect world, he would have registered his web page to a metadata maintaining service that would have told him that another registered web page links to this web page.

And be happy that your ODF documents will not become outdated. ODF is an open standard, a good citizen of the World Wide Web.

Tuesday Aug 04, 2009

Creating images with multiple hot spots

You can use OpenOffice.org to create nice interactive banners for your web page within a few minutes.

LinksForumHomeBlogs

  1. Open a new Draw page.
  2. Click the Rectangle icon down in the Drawing toolbar, then drag a rectangle on your screen.
  3. Click the Area Style/Filling listbox and select a color for the area.
  4. Double-click the area to get a text cursor.
  5. Type your text, then select the text. Use the controls on the Text Formatting toolbar to select a font, foont size, and font color.
  6. Use space characters for the spacing between words.
  7. Right-click the rectangle, then choose Convert - To 3D.



  1. Click the Rotate icon on the Drawing toolbar. (It is the default icon for the Mode toolbar, so you will see Effects as the name of the Rotate icon. We don't need to understand this at this moment.)
  2. Using the Rotate tool, rotate the 3D rectangle to give a pleasant view effect. You can also use the 3D Effects dialog for many more effects. Press Ctrl+Z to undo an effect that you don't like.


  1. Export the finished graphic into a bitmap format that a modern web browser can read. Let's choose PNG format.
  2. Select the graphic. Choose File > Export. In the Export dialog, be sure that "Selection" is enabled, so you export only the selected graphic. Open the File format listbox and select PNG. Enter a file name and click Export. For some file formats, you will get a dialog to select additional options.
  3. Open a new Writer document.
  4. Choose Insert > Picture > From file, and select your picture.


  1. Choose Edit > ImageMap to open the ImageMap Editor.
  2. In the ImageMap Editor, click the Rectangle tool and drag a rectangular area to define the first hot area.
  3. Enter the address for the hyperlink. Click the green Apply icon at the left to apply this edit. Then you can define the next hot area and so on. Close the dialog with the x icon in the dialog title bar. No need to use the Save icon inside the ImageMap Editor unless you need a special ImageMap file of its own.
  4. Save your text document as an ODT file, then "Save as" using the File type "HTML document".

You can already use the resulting HTML file on your web page. But may be you want to see the HTML code to fine-tune the pixel addresses of the hot areas, for example.

  1. Close the HTML document in Writer.
  2. Choose File > Open.
  3. In the Open dialog, open the File type listbox and select "Web pages". Double-click your HTML file. You now see the document open in Writer/Web.
  4. Choose View > HTML Source to view the HTML source.


You can edit the HTML source directly. For example, edit the second and fourth parameters of the COORDS tags to be the same, or change the ALT texts that appear as mouse-over texts.


Thursday May 14, 2009

Some documents can be brushed up by pasting sticky notes on the pages. You can create some nice notes in OpenOffice.org without much effort. Save them in the Gallery, and then later you can easily position them to any place on your pages.


Create a container for the sticky notes:

  1. Open the Gallery. It's in Tools > Gallery.

  2. Click New Theme... button to create a new theme. Name it "Sticky Notes" for example.

Create some notes:

  1. In Writer, click the Show Draw Functions icon on the Standard toolbar.

    The Drawing toolbar opens next to the bottom of the window.

  2. Click the Text icon (with the letter T on it). Then drag a rectangle on the page.

  3. Enter some text to keep the text box visible. You are in text edit mode now.

  4. Click outside the text box to leave text edit mode.

  5. Click the text once. Now the text box is selected as an object. You see eight handles to move and scale the text box.

  6. Right-click inside the text box to open the context menu.

  7. Choose Area to edit the area properties. For example, you can apply a solid yellow color, or a color gradient.


You can also apply a shadow and transparency to the area and the shadow.

Choose the Line command in the context menu to set the border properties.

Choose the Text command in the context menu to define some spacing between text and borders.

Click outside the text box to leave the selected object.

Double-click the text to edit the text.

Store the sticky note in the Gallery:

Use drag-and-drop to copy the text box into the Gallery. This can be a little bit tricky.

  1. First you must click the text box to see the eight handles. When you see the handles you know that the object is selected.

  2. When you just click and drag the object, it will not leave the document's pages. So you must click the text box and hold down the mouse button for a second or two without moving the mouse. Then, without letting go of the mouse button, start moving the mouse to the Gallery.

  3. Now you can release the mouse button to drop the text box into the current theme folder of the Gallery.

Apply a sticky note from the Gallery:

  1. With any document open, open the Gallery. Open the Sticky Notes theme.

  2. Drag-and-drop a text box (also known as a sticky note now) from the Gallery into the document. No need to wait a second when you drag from the Gallery.

  3. Double-click the text box to edit the text. Select the text and choose Format > Character to change the text color or other character properties.

By default, the text box is anchored to the paragraph where you dropped it. You can move the text box to another paragraph, and the anchor will follow. You can also change the text box anchoring to be anchored to the page, or to a character. See the Help for more information about anchors.




Friday Sep 05, 2008

Have you ever been reading articles on the OpenOffice.org Wiki and wished you could collect up a few of your favorite articles and print them off or save them?  Have you been reading some of the OpenOffice.org documentation on the Wiki and wanted to have a PDF or ODF of the manual?  Well, now you can.  We've recently added an extension to the OpenOffice.org Wiki that allows you to build up a collection of Wiki articles and convert them to PDF or ODF.

How does it work?  It is fairly easy.  There is a new menu item on the left side of the OpenOffice.org Wiki titled My Collection.  To get started with your own collection:

  • Go to the first Wiki article you want to add to your collection
  • Click Start collection (if this is your first collection) and follow the instructions to add the first page to your collection.
  • Browse to the next page you want to add to your collection
  • Click Add page
  • Repeat until you have added all the pages you want to your collection

Now that you have a collection, you can create your ODF document.  Click Show collection in the My collection menu.  On the right side of the new Wiki page, there is a box titled Download collection.  Select ODF from the drop-down box and click Download.  The collection you created is sent off to the conversion server and your ODF is soon ready to be downloaded.

This new extension of the OpenOffice.org Wiki  has a few other options and features that you can read up on in the Collections Help.

There are a few pre-made collections already available for you to download such as the Administration Guide and the Basic Guide, and more to come soon.

If you have your own MediaWiki based Wiki, you can add the Collections extension and give your readers the ability to create their own ODF files too.

Tuesday Apr 15, 2008

While you work with OpenOffice.org and find your way through the menus, toolbars, and windows, you most possibly learned to praise the highly useful Navigator window and its companion, the Styles and Formatting window.

The Problem

Unfortunately, those windows sometimes appear at places where they shouldn't, urging you to move them out of the way. See the image, which overplays the problem a little bit because the screen size is so small.

2 windows hide document

 

The Solution: Docking

You can order your sidekicks to stay near the border of your document window. Several ways to send them off:

  • Ctrl+double-click a gray area of the window. For example, the gray area near the icons. This sends the window to one of the borders, where it appears as a docked window.

  • Grab the title bar of a window and move it over to any of the four borders. As soon as you see a gray border showing a preview of the new placement, release the mouse button.

Note: This second method only works when your operating system and/or display driver is set up in such a way to show full windows when moving with the mouse. If you only see a wireframe replacement of the window while you move it, then you cannot dock the window with the mouse.



(Sorry for the mousewriting – could not find out how to use the Gimp texttool to type more than just one character)

A Docked Window

Now that the window is docked, it will remember this status. You can enable and disable the Navigator window or the Styles and Formatting window, whichever you docked to the border, using the keyboard shortcuts. Press F5 or F11 respectively.

 

The new border between the docked window and the document is a special tool with different functions:

  • Click the Show/Hide icon in the middle of the new border to show or hide the docked window. The window shows up until you close it by clicking the Show/Hide icon again.

  • Click the new border, but not the icon in the middle, to show the docked window temporarily. When you click outside the docked window, it hides automatically.



More Docked Windows

When you now grab another window and dock it to the same space (this may require some training), you can even have two or more windows docked next to each other at the same border.


The Conclusion

Ctrl+double-click a gray area in a docked window to convert it back into a standard free window with a title bar.

These free windows aren't bad. They remember the position and size they had the last time.

So you can drag the Navigator window to almost full screen size to get a superb overview of all objects in your document. Press F5 to hide this super window and work on the text, press F5 again for another overview.



Friday Nov 23, 2007

If you have read and write access to a server on the Internet, you can open and save your files directly using OpenOffice.org (OOo). The following protocols are available to transfer your files:

  • FTP

  • HTTP

  • HTTPS (starting with OOo 2.4)

Using OOo file dialogs

To transfer files using Internet protocols, you must use the OOo file dialogs to open and save your documents.

Choose "Tools - Options - OOo - General" and enable the "Use OOo dialogs" checkbox.


Opening a file from the Internet

Now you can choose "File - Open" or press Ctrl+O and enter the full name of any file that OOo can open. Don't forget to enter the protocol at the beginning of the name.


To open the ODF text document "mydocument.odt" which resides on the server www.myserver.com in the folder myfolder, you can enter the following text as a file name:

http://www.myserver.com/myfolder/mydocument.odt

This is only a hypothetical example to illustrate the syntax - do not enter that server name now as it might exist in real life.

You can also start the full name with ftp:// instead of http:// in case there is an FTP server running at the other end.

Secure file transfer

Starting with OpenOffice.org 2.4 you can also use the secure https:// protocol. This secure protocol requires an authentication by name and password.

As you may want to connect to multiple servers using a different name and password each, we introduced a kind of identity management system which allows you to setup a master password. You may already know this from your Firefox web browser. This new master password feature can be found on the redesigned OOo 2.4 "Tools - Options - OOo - Security" dialog.

Using a proxy server

Some Internet service providers may ask you to enter a proxy server. You can enter proxy server addresses and port numbers by "Tools - Options - Internet - Proxy".


Saving to the Internet

When you open a document using an Internet protocol, that document is downloaded to a temporary folder on your local drive. You can edit the document as you like and save it to any other folder on your local drive.

If you have write permission to the web server, you can also use the OOo file save dialog to save the document to the server. You must enter the full name including the protocol to save the document directly to the Internet server. If you just press Ctrl+S you would only update the temporary file on your local drive.

Using the OOo file dialogs, you can easily work with documents stored on an Internet server. This allows you to use Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) as a working environment with OpenOffice.org.


Tuesday Jul 24, 2007

As an OOo power user you already do use the OOo menu in your Firefox browser, don't you?




This extension to Firefox is located at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4102


The submenus offer many useful links to OpenOffice.org web sites, as well as other related links.

And the OOo menu command clearly signals to everyone that you belong to the Friends Of OOo!


Friday Jun 08, 2007

Most users of OpenOffice.org already know that it is easy to change all icons at once, to find a totally new look of their Office. Only few StarOffice users know that they can enjoy an all new icon theme, too.

In OOo, you choose Tools - Options - OOo - View. Here you can select another Icon Style from a list box. Click OK, and you see the new icons immediately.



The supplied icon sets may be different for different distributions of OOo. In my version, I can select from the default set, Industrial, HiContrast, and Crystal.

I like the large icons of the Crystal set, so I want to see those icons in my installation of StarOffice, too.

Unfortunately, StarOffice does not offer the Icon Style list box. There may be a reason for this decision, but there don't seem to be any technical barriers to use an OOo icon set for StarOffice. You can even use a different icon set for every user on a network installation. This is how to proceed - but be careful, this is not an official method but more of a "hack":

  1. Get the images_crystal.zip file from an OOo installation. The images*.zip files are stored in the {OOo_installation}/share/config folder.
  2. Copy the file to your {StarOffice8_userfiles}/user/config folder. On Linux systems, this is ~/.staroffice8/user/config. On Windows systems, this is something like C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\StarOffice8\user\config.
  3. Rename the copied file to images.zip
  4. Restart StarOffice 8 to see the new icons. You may want to select the "large" icon size in Tools - Options - StarOffice - View.

As a StarOffice user, I want to thank all OOo icon artists for their great work that they contribute to the community!


Thursday Dec 07, 2006

Searching the Web From Within OOo

Few users know all of the hidden treasures inside OOo, but today you'll discover one more cool feature.

How about being able to select a word in your Writer text, click a button, and immediately see what your favorite Internet search site knows about that word?

This is cool and easy, and the best: it is already built into your OOo (has been there for ages). All you need is OOo and a default Web browser.

To search the Web

  1. Open a Writer document with some text inside.
  2. Choose the menu command View - Toolbars - Hyperlink Bar.
  3. Select a word or some consecutive text. You see the text in the left text box of the Hyperlink Bar. If you want, you can enter text directly into this text box.
  4. Click the rightmost icon on the Hyperlink Bar. You see a drop-down list of Internet search sites.
  5. Click your favorite site from the list. Your default Web browser opens and displays the answers.

To configure the Search sites

Some sites are already configured. You can change the options, and add more sites.

  1. Choose Tools - Options - Internet - Search.
  2. Click a control on the right side of the dialog, then click the Help button. Read how to configure new Web sites into this list.

Friday Oct 13, 2006

Digital Signatures in OOo

You can obtain a certificate from a certification authority to sign your documents.

By signing an OOo document with your digital signature, you can ensure that the person who gets your document can verify the document is still the same version that you saved.

The receiver of your document will see an icon in the Status Bar which confirms “yes, the document is the same as the saved version”.

If you or someone else change the document, the icon will look broken and thus give the information “this document was signed, but now it has been changed from the original version”.

In the OOo Help, you can find a page which describes how to obtain a certificate, and how to digitally sign your OOo documents.

  1. Press F1 to open Help.

  2. On the Index tab page, enter “digital signature” and double-click the entry.

Another introduction to digital signatures in OOo was published October 12th 2006, by Dmitri Popov on LinuxToday: http://www.linuxtoday.com/security/2006101201426OSHL

Click the Complete Story link to read the fine introduction by Dmitri, and do not hesitate to visit his OOo page at http://www.nothickmanuals.info/doku.php


Wednesday Oct 11, 2006

Blogging Made Easy With OOo

Finally, the new blogging extension for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org is available. Browse to the Sun Store at http://globalspecials.sun.com/ and click the link or go direct to this page.

Sun Weblog Publisher

From the Sun Store, after some handshake protocol involving a money transfer, you'll get a file with the *.pkg file name extension. Installation is easy using the menu Tools - Package Manager. (Starting with OOo 2.1 this is called Extension Manager.)

Once installed, you will notice a new menu entry Weblog and a new toolbar.

Add your Blog site and access info on the settings dialog.

Write your Blog as a normal OOo Writer document, include some formatting and pictures, and click the Send to Weblog icon.


Now formatting your Blog is as easy as in Writer. Include pictures. Use the spellchecker.

You can retrieve your existing blog entries, edit them in Writer and then upload with a single click.

A first tip: Choose View - Toolbars - Hyperlink Bar to view and edit the hyperlinks in your blog.


Wednesday Sep 27, 2006

Starting with OOo 2.0.3, a new Export feature was introduced to simplify the deployment of BASIC code for all users who share the same installation.
  1. Open the BASIC Macro Organizer and create a new BASIC library (choose "Tools - Macros - Organize Macros - OOo BASIC", then click Organizer, then click Libraries tab, then click New). Enter a name for your library.
  2. Click Edit and write your BASIC code.
  3. Again open the Macro Organizer, then click the new Export button to export your BASIC code as a UNO extension file (formerly known as a UNO package)
Now every user can choose "Tools - Package Manager" (which will later be called Extension Manager) to add the new file to the user's installation. But with many users on a shared installation, it is more comfortable when the Admin starts unopkg to install the extension for all users.
  1. Become root user with write permission for the shared installation of OOo.
  2. In a terminal window, CD to {install_dir}/program and enter the following command
  3. unopkg add --shared path_to_UNO_extension_file/UNO_extension_filename
Note: The Export button is new in OOo 2.0.3. It is only activated for your own libraries.
Call unopkg without parameter for a short help.

Tuesday May 23, 2006

We all know that Sun Support  also supports OpenOffice.org users (if they want to pay for the professional support).
But the OOo community has some more support offerings of their own. And that support is free of charge for everyone. Perhaps, if you see how well it works, you'll decide you want to pay back something to the community, let's say you give some advice to others on the mail list, but that depends on your own decision.
The following list gives only some of the entry points for OOo support.

http://documentation.openoffice.org/ is the documentation project home page with links to the mail list, documents, tutorials and more.

http://oooauthors.org/ is another site where authors of helpful documentation meet.

http://www.oooforum.org/ is a Web forum with questions and answers.

Several language projects have developed wonderful Web sites that are worth browsing if you can read the language. For example, the german project maintains the site http://de.openoffice.org/, and the french project can be found at http://fr.openoffice.org/.

This blog copyright 2009 by fpe