Open Office Support (Re: Openoffice: keeping forrest styles loaded)

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Reinhard Pötz wrote:
> Jason End wrote:
> 
>> You're right! I hadn't noticed that all documents work
>> like that. Seems kinda silly to me. I'm still on my crusade to allow 
>> non-tech people to
>> write documents for forrest.
>>  
>>
> 
> For this reasons I added support for OpenOffice. Could you report back 
> your experiences with OO and Forrest? It would be very appreciated!

I have done some work on OO integration, I have Writer and Impress files 
working with basic formatting. Basically, I have extended the work you 
did and am extracting style information from the sx* files as well. What 
does this mean? We are not restricted to using a particular template, we 
simply use the normal formatting rules.

Of course, the problem with this is that the content could have a 
totally different look and feel to the main site. Do we see this as a 
major problem?

Ross

Re: Open Office Support (Re: Openoffice: keeping forrest styles loaded)

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Reinhard Pötz wrote:
> Ross Gardler wrote:
> 
>> Reinhard Pötz wrote:
>>
>>> Jason End wrote:
>>>
>>>> You're right! I hadn't noticed that all documents work
>>>> like that. Seems kinda silly to me. I'm still on my crusade to allow 
>>>> non-tech people to
>>>> write documents for forrest.
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>
>>> For this reasons I added support for OpenOffice. Could you report 
>>> back your experiences with OO and Forrest? It would be very appreciated!
>>
>>
>>
>> I have done some work on OO integration, I have Writer and Impress 
>> files working with basic formatting. Basically, I have extended the 
>> work you did and am extracting style information from the sx* files as 
>> well. What does this mean? We are not restricted to using a particular 
>> template, we simply use the normal formatting rules.
>>
>> Of course, the problem with this is that the content could have a 
>> totally different look and feel to the main site. Do we see this as a 
>> major problem?
> 
> 
> 
> When I integrated OO I was looking for a way to write documentation in a 
> very simple way without having to learn a new tool. I have to admit that 
> I prefer extracting only the style-free content of an OO document in 
> order to get a common layout.
> 
> I think we can support both solutions: We can add special information to 
> the header which provides information that "only" the content should be 
> extracted. If this flag is not set your stylesheet is used. We should 
> also add a OpenOffice writer template (.stw file) for the convenience of 
> our users.
> WDYT?

This is a good idea, and one easily implenmeted.

> BTW, do you use the original XHTML export stylesheet of OpenOffice or 
> did you write your own one?

I started with your stylesheets and started extracting style information 
from the OO documents. At the moment this is presented as an embedded 
stylesheet, but I intend to create a stylesheet on the fly that is 
downloaded on demand.

Ross

Re: Open Office Support (Re: Openoffice: keeping forrest styles loaded)

[Reinhard Pötz <re...@apache.org>]

Ross Gardler wrote:

> Reinhard Pötz wrote:
>
>> Jason End wrote:
>>
>>> You're right! I hadn't noticed that all documents work
>>> like that. Seems kinda silly to me. I'm still on my crusade to allow 
>>> non-tech people to
>>> write documents for forrest.
>>>  
>>>
>>
>> For this reasons I added support for OpenOffice. Could you report 
>> back your experiences with OO and Forrest? It would be very appreciated!
>
>
> I have done some work on OO integration, I have Writer and Impress 
> files working with basic formatting. Basically, I have extended the 
> work you did and am extracting style information from the sx* files as 
> well. What does this mean? We are not restricted to using a particular 
> template, we simply use the normal formatting rules.
>
> Of course, the problem with this is that the content could have a 
> totally different look and feel to the main site. Do we see this as a 
> major problem?


When I integrated OO I was looking for a way to write documentation in a 
very simple way without having to learn a new tool. I have to admit that 
I prefer extracting only the style-free content of an OO document in 
order to get a common layout.

I think we can support both solutions: We can add special information to 
the header which provides information that "only" the content should be 
extracted. If this flag is not set your stylesheet is used. We should 
also add a OpenOffice writer template (.stw file) for the convenience of 
our users.
WDYT?

BTW, do you use the original XHTML export stylesheet of OpenOffice or 
did you write your own one?

-- 
Reinhard

Re: Open Office Support (Re: Openoffice: keeping forrest styles loaded)

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
> Ross Gardler wrote:
> ...
> 
>> I have done some work on OO integration, I have Writer and Impress 
>> files working with basic formatting. Basically, I have extended the 
>> work you did and am extracting style information from the sx* files as 
>> well. What does this mean? We are not restricted to using a particular 
>> template, we simply use the normal formatting rules.
>>
>> Of course, the problem with this is that the content could have a 
>> totally different look and feel to the main site. Do we see this as a 
>> major problem?
> 
> 
> Well, it defeats the whole purpose of Forrest in separating content from 
> presentation...

Not really, the style information is generally encoded in the OO 
documents as fo style attributes. What I am doing is extracting this 
information and creating a new stylesheet from the fo data in the source 
document. This can then be overridden by other stylesheets if so desired 
(at least if I wasn't writing the style information into the output 
XHTML, which is only a temporary technique).

What I mean is that, with Reinhard's suggestion of making it optional as 
to whether we include the style information from the original OO source 
document we can still use the style provided with the skin. But if we 
want to provide styled pages we can.

Perhaps a use case will help:

I use OO to allow my lecturers to produce presentations in a form they 
are used to. I then use Forrest to produce web pages from these 
resentations. The web pages I would like to styl ein a consitent way, 
but some styling (like bold, italic etc) I want to let through.

However, I also produce a slide representation of the presentations. In 
these all I have is basic navigation (next, previous, home) and the 
slide itself. On this version I would like to see all the formatting of 
the original presentation (complete with backgrounds etc.)

Ross.

Re: Open Office Support (Re: Openoffice: keeping forrest styles loaded)

[Nicola Ken Barozzi <ni...@apache.org>]

Ross Gardler wrote:
...
> I have done some work on OO integration, I have Writer and Impress files 
> working with basic formatting. Basically, I have extended the work you 
> did and am extracting style information from the sx* files as well. What 
> does this mean? We are not restricted to using a particular template, we 
> simply use the normal formatting rules.
> 
> Of course, the problem with this is that the content could have a 
> totally different look and feel to the main site. Do we see this as a 
> major problem?

Well, it defeats the whole purpose of Forrest in separating content from 
presentation...

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nicolaken@apache.org
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
---------------------------------------------------------------------