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{ Category Archives } OpenOffice.org

Column Widths in OOo Tables

Finding the width of a column in a table in OpenOffice.org writer is a bit of a black art, because the widths aren't stored anywhere, just the relative widths in arbitrary units. And if cells have been combined, then the object model has no concept of "columns" and there is no way to find the […]

OpenOffice.org FontDescriptor

OOo controls have a Struct FontDescriptor that contains all the information about the text (font name, point size, etc.) so one would hope that to make an editbox have the same font as the containing text range, all you would have to do is textField.fontDescriptor = textRange.fontDescriptor but no such luck. FontDescriptors apply to everything […]

OOo Tutorial on Exporting to PDF

There's a great tutorial on exporting from OpenOffice.org Writer to PDF, but as far as I can tell it's orphaned on the openoffice.org website; there's no link from the tutorials page. It documents all the properties of the export filter and goes through the process in great detail. Hopefully the link from this blog will […]

OpenOffice.org quirks

Some of the first things I needed to get straight to move from Microsoft Office scripting to Open Office scripting: The BASIC isn't quite compatible: I know the object model is completely different, but even the underlying language isn't quite the same. I wanted to use the InStrRev function, but it wasn't there! Then I […]

Diving into OpenOffice.org

My hospital isn't fully electronic yet; they use a hybrid system where doctors notes and orders are written on paper, to be scanned into the electronic chart at the end of the patient's stay. Everything else (nurse's notes, labs, radiology results) are electronic. It actually works pretty well, with most of the advantages of an […]