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Subject:Re: getting started with OOo From:Solveig Haugland <solveig -at- techwriterstuff -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:38:09 -0700
>>OOo didn't seem to have any of the conditional text
capabilities one would need to create single-source documents. Did I
miss something, or is this a feature set they haven't implemented?
OOo is a little short on conditional text capabilities. It has them but the last
time I tried to make them work they didn't. The conditional text would hide based
on the condition, but not show when the condition changed, and it's paragraph
based, so not very granular.
It's long on XML capabilities (aka file format) and I believe can be hooked up to
Docbook or some XML parsing tools with a little elbow grease (Tools > XML Filter
Settings). A friend at Sun has been working for the past couple weeks putting
together a fairly handy stripper-aparter-and-putter-back-together in Java and
StarOffice, and he's got some pretty good features.
But that takes a little effort. I'd say XML, or creating HTML through something
that can do things based on styles (possibly convert files to Word then use
WebWorks) is its singlesource angle rather than something like Frame's
conditional text.
> Since we're on the OOo subject...
>
> I did an evaluation of 1.1 when it came out, and overall it seemed very
> powerful and in many ways a much better authoring environment than Word.
> (Actually, I'm hard pressed to come up with something that's a worse
> environment than Word.) However, we decided to stick with our docbook
> tools because OOo didn't seem to have any of the conditional text
> capabilities one would need to create single-source documents. Did I
> miss something, or is this a feature set they haven't implemented?
>
> Bill Lawrence
>
> Senior Technical Writer
> Matrix Solutions
>
