PyOpenOffice 0.2 (formerly: PyOOTools)

Process OpenOffice.org Writer Files and transform them to PDF without installing OpenOffice.org

Test it "live" on this server.

FAQ:

What is PyOpenOffice?

• It is a class library, written in the Python Language.
• It is a platform-independent command-line utility (many abilities of the commandline interface are still missing)

What can PyOpenOffice do for you?

• Make serial letters and reports from templates in the SXW-Format and store them anew as SXW-Files
• Extract the pure text information from the SXW-Document and store it in a plain text file or a PDF-File
  
• Perform simple transformations from SXW-Files to PDF-Files without installing OO - for example on a webserver

At what stage of development is PyOpenOffice now?

• It is still an Alpha Release. Nevertheless many parts of it are a "spin-off" product of my software "Bezirksreiter" for church administration - which is considered to be stable now.
• Many features are still missing: better transformation of tables to PDF, making use of the stylesheet information in "styles.xml" and so on.

What license has PyOpenOffice?

• It is distributed under the GNU Public License

What software is required?

• Any operating system that supports the following software:
  
• Python 2.3 (maybe it works form 2.1 upwards, but this is not recommended) for the SXW-Processing
• The ReportlabToolkit and the Python Imaging Library for the transformation from SXW to PDF
• OpenOffice.org for viewing and editing the templates
• The PyOpenOffice-Zip-Package
  

What are the principles behind PyOpenOffice?

• Unpacking and Re-Packing of the SXW-Archive-File is done by the Python zipfile Module
  
• Serial letters and reports are processed by using Regular Expressions and string extract and replace operations
• Generating PDF is performed using the XML-SAX-Parser from the Python Standard Library, the ReportlabToolkit and the Python Imaging Library
• Plain text extract uses  the SAX-Parser
• When transforming to PDF four trials are made: with all known attributes, without underlining, without images, plain text only.
  
• Read the sources! But: Too many functions and comments are still in German - sorry

Usage

• Unzip PyOpenOffice.zip into your path
• Make sure that pyopenoffice.py has write access to this path
  
• Write your skript and import pyopenoffice. Mind: there are still global variables in use, so you always have to use the whole module
  
• make an instance of the interface class: tool = pyopenoffice.PyOpenOffice()
• provide a replace_listofdicts, for example from an SQL-Query: [{"Surname": "Simon", "FirstName": "Martin"}, {"Surname": "Miller", "FirstName": "Steve"}]
• provide a template file with data fields: "TFA-Surname-TFE" etc.
• provide a list with picture files
  
• use a table with a row in it, containing "Multi:TFA-Surname-TFE" - the table row will be repeated, using all the records from your replace_listofdicts
• have a look at the example template "test.sxw" - run "python pyopenoffice" from the command line and check the result
• have a look at "test_pic.sxw" (it explains the replacePictures() function) - run "python pyopenoffice  -pictest" from the command line and check the result
  
• or: provide any SXW-File for transforming it to PDF, with or without template fields
  
• work with it:

Restrictions and Known Bugs

• the serial letter function will not work with frames that are anchored at the page. Use the "anchor at paragraph" option instead.

• only DIN A4 (portrait or landscape) is used
  
• only the "automatic-styles" of the current document are parsed - inherited styles from master documents etc. will be dropped
• all fonts are mapped to the three standard postscript fonts of PDF: Times, Helvetica and Courier. Only "pt" is accepted for fontsizes
• the "underline"-function of the ReportlabToolkit has several bugs. When difficulties occur, PyOpenOffice will change all underlines to italics. If text alignment "justified" is used in the document, this will be done by default.
  
• frames and columns are ignored - the text is printed as normal paragraphs
• tables only have automatically calculated standard sizes. If at least one cell has borders, the whole table is printed with a grid
• not all image formats are processed (due to the use of the Python Imaging Library)
• image sizes may only be given either in cm or inch
• only headings form heading 1 to heading 3 can be mapped - they will have always a certain standard appearence
• ........... try it out: I think nevertheless the PDFs do not look too bad.

Release History

• 0.2 New function to replace pictures - generate catalogues, worksheets, photo galleries etc. from an SXW-Template. Patch for makeSerialLetters() to make it usable with Asian fonts (no PDF support for such fonts yet).
  
• 0.13 Bugfix for transforming tables to PDF: tables with headers are allowed now in the SXW-Template. Support for special signs like the Euro-Symbol by changing from Latin-1 to cp1252-transformation.
  
• 0.12 Bugfix for the makeSerialLetters()-function. Better test.sxw to explain this function.
  
• 0.11 Bugfix for Windows XP, test.sxw adapted for English language users