Showing posts with label Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Office. Show all posts

TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki has been around for about four years now, and I heard of it a couple of times, but I only just recently got around to using it regularly. I decided I needed a decent local home page for whenever my browser started up; instead of fetching a page from the Internet (most likely Google), why not just have all the basic stuff I need, like reminders and such?

What makes TiddlyWiki great for such a purpose is that it's just a single file. Within the file are all the Javascript, CSS, and HTML you need to maintain a Wiki. You can move the file around and it will contain all the stuff you've written.

Check marks and other unicode stuff

Only now decided to put my class attendance sheets into OpenOffice.org, and so the question arises: how do I put a check mark into a document? I could just mark it with an X but the oomph just isn't there. I want a right and proper check mark!

Apparently, the answer lies in Unicode. A ✓ is unicode u2713, and a ✔ is unicode u2714. Believe it or not, they have their own Wikipedia entry. But how to enter them?

Just press Ctrl+Shift+U, then the Unicode number. Try it!

Reconciling with OpenOffice.org

Looking back at my usage patterns over the past year, it looks like I have been permanently reconciled with OpenOffice.org. Up until the middle of 2008, I had been actively resisting OpenOffice, preferring instead to use Abiword (for my word processing) or Gnumeric (for my spreadsheets); the only times I would care to dip into OpenOffice.org was for my presentations. But now, it looks like I'll be using OpenOffice.org for the most part.

I guess the reason for the shift was some unhappiness with Abiword. Abiword is fine and clutter-free, but annoying when it comes to its decisions of where to break a sentence. For an obsessive-compulsive writer like me, that's a real no-no. OpenOffice.org Writer on the other hand, despite its initially confusion options, managed the sentence breaks a bit better.

When my word processing shifted -- that being my main application anyhow -- so did my spreadsheet use.

WordGrinder

Somebody at the forums asked if there was a decent terminal-based word processor in the vein of OpenOffice.org. I thought it was a strange request, seeing as how word processors nowadays focus on formatting: if you put it in a terminal, doesn't it stand to reason that you lose the formatting?  The only answers that came to mind were text editors like pico, nano, and joe, and these don't really fit the bill.

As it turns out, there is a text-based word processor, and it's name is WordGrinder. Granted, it doesn't do any formatting, but it's as close as you can possibly get to a terminal-based word processor.

A couple of caveats: WordGrinder saves in its own format, not in plaintext, so be careful to export it first before reading it in another word processor. Also, WordGrinder's key combinations are simplistic and a tad counter-intuitive: you really just have the Escape key to call up menus, and Ctrl-C if you want to cancel any prompts.

Final verdict: an interesting project if you're stuck in terminal mode, but you're probably better off with Pyroom.

pdftk

pdftk doesn't look like much, being a command-line utility, but it's still a pretty handy utility to have in your virtual toolbox. As its man page describes, it's a tool for manipulating PDFs. You want to combine several PDFs into one document? pdftk is the answer. In fact, that's why I grabbed it from the repositories in the first place.

But apparently, it's more than that, as the pdftk web site demonstrates. pdftk can also:

  • Split PDF Pages into a New Document
  • Rotate PDF Pages or Documents
  • Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
  • Encrypt Output as Desired
  • Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data or XFDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
  • Apply a Background Watermark or a Foreground Stamp
  • Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
  • Update PDF Metadata
  • Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
  • Unpack PDF Attachments
  • Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
  • Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams

    which is really quite more than what I need for the moment.

    Possibly the most useful command structure:

    pdftk A=one.pdf B=two.pdf cat A1-7 B1-5 A8 output combined.pdf

    which splits pages from multiple PDFs into a new document. From the example above, grab pages 1 to 7 of the first document, mix that together with pages 1 to 5 of the second document, then page 8 of the first document again, and combine that into a new document.

    If you're more inclined to use a GUI front end, there's a couple listed on the web site, though none that I've really tried.
  • Tomboy and Ubuntu One

    Here's one way to get immediate benefits out of Ubuntu One: use it as a conduit to synchronize Tomboy notes between one computer and another. Tomboy's synchronization files are simply XML, and you can specify which folder they're in.



    Do the same on as many computers as you use, and voila! No need to separately organize your notes on different computers.

    Update: I've tried this but it works only up to a point. Unfortunately, Ubuntu One will sometimes decide that there's a conflict in your documents and write that into a new file name that has the word "conflict" in it. Anyhow, use with caution.

    Using OpenOffice.org Writer for book layout

    The past few weeks, I've been busy with a big project, a book project. Not quite my book, no, it's someone else's collection of scripts and screenplays. How I got the job and why I took it is another long story in itself, something I'll reveal someday. Let's just say it was ve-eeery interesting, as I had to juggle several activities, such as negotiating with the printers, commissioning artists, coordinating with the author, and laying out the book. That's what's kept me away from this blog for this long.

    The experience hasn't been without its rewards. For one thing, I now know how to work with OpenOffice.org Writer better. I know everyone has their favorite layout tool, but OpenOffice.org was the one I found most handy for the job.

    What I found most challenging was getting the different page styles right. Putting out a book is different from putting out a report in that pages have to be laid out differently. For my purposes, I needed a different layouts for the first page (no footer), left-side pages (page number and chapter name on the left), and right-side pages (page number and chapter name on the right).

    Now, OO.o Writer has an option for different footers for left pages and right pages, but owing to the first page with no footer, I couldn't use that at all. Instead, I had to delve into OpenOffice.org styles.

    In general, styles can be applied to characters, paragraphs, frames, lists or pages. For my purposes, it's the last that I've had to work with. Here's how:

    You can bring up the Styles dialog through the menu or by pressing Ctrl-F11. Under the Pages category, you can find the predefined styles First Page, Left Page, and Right Page.


    Now, this is where we need to make some changes. Under Organization, you can see that the Next Style for First Page is Default. Next Style means the style that will be applied to the page after the First Page. So what kind of style should follow First Page? Left Page, of course!



    You can visit the other tabs to fix up the other settings of the page, like margins, background, header, and footer.





    Now, after setting up the First Page, we need to set up the Left Page and the Right Page. Again, we go to the Organization tab for each.

    What style should follow the Left Page? The Right Page.



    And what style follows the Right Page? The Left Page.



    Similar to the First Page, you can modify the other page parameters.

    So what happens now? When you apply the First Page style to a page, the subsequent page will have the Left Page style, the page after that will have the Right Page style, and the one after that will be Left Page again. And so on and so forth.

    What happens if you want to switch to another page style after a particular page? For example, let's say you're done with a chapter and you want to open up another page with the First Page style. Well, you insert a Manual Break:



    The following page will then follow the First Page style.

    OpenOffice.org Impress Backgrounds

    For someone whose living involves giving presentations, I haven't really maximized the capabilities of OpenOffice.org. For me, it's been more about content rather than form -- I don't go for fancy transitions, or even fancy backgrounds. Thus, most features of OpenOffice.org are really lost on me: I just know the bare minimum.

    Today, however, while getting set to put together a presentation on open source to my co-teachers, I thought: "Wouldn't it be good to have a dark background? White is so glaring." So I fiddled a bit with Impress. And d'oh! It was actually a simple thing.


    First, go to the Master View (that's View->Master->Slide Master). Then, right click on the slide master area. Click on Slide->Page Setup...


    Now you'll get a background selection tab. Select the color that you want. Impress will automatically select the best color for the text.

    This seems rather insignificant to blog about, but I tell you, in the past, I would manually change the color of the font everytime I used a different-colored background. It was tedious! That's why I've been sticking with black text over white backgrounds.

    I'm glad I found this better way of managing backgrounds and foreground text.

    StarDict

    Words are my stock in trade, so a dictionary is an essential tool. But where to get a free dictionary for Linux? The answer is StarDict.

    StarDict isn't actually a dictionary; rather, it's an interface to dictionary files, also freely downloadable from the Internet. StarDict is not without its quirks, but for its basic functionality -- looking up words -- it's fast and intuitive.

    As StarDict is in the Ubuntu repositories, installation is quick and easy. There are several versions, though, appropriate to the windowing system you want to use, so choose carefully.

    StarDict also needs dictionary files, and these you can download from the StarDict page on SourceForge. There are several free and open source dictionaries available; they can be used simultaneously with StarDict.

    Since the dictionaries are compressed in BZ2 format, you can extract them using:

    tar xjvf stardict-dictionary-name.tar.bz2

    Then, just move the extracted directory to /usr/share/stardic/dic.

    The next time you start up StarDict, the said dictionary will be available. You don't really have to activate anything; StarDict picks them up automatically.

    The version of StarDict from the repositories now includes Internet dictionary search as well as an interface to Google translate. Unfortunately, these don't really work so well and I've had the program momentarily freeze while it tried for a connection. I suggest you disable these added features and use StarDict exclusively as a local dictionary tool.



    Linux compose key sequences

    So there I was, trying to spell "naïve" correctly, but failing, because I didn't quite know how to make the ï with the compose key. Oh, sure, I can Ñ, and I can ñ, and I can ä, é, and í, but how oh how can I ï?

    Sigh.

    It turns out I just have to precede the i with a ".

    Oh, and there's a complete list, too.

    Hmmm...did I make sense with this post?

    Zim Desktop Wiki

    Because it ships by default with Ubuntu, I've been using Tomboy for my occasional note-taking needs. It's convenient and all, but it's a little too heavy with its Mono requirements. No problem for my desktop, but I wouldn't install it on my stripped-down laptop.

    A more lightweight replacement for Tomboy is Zim. Like Tomboy, it's a desktop wiki in that you can automatically create links within notes. Largely, though, it feels like a much improved notepad.



    Zim works like Tomboy in almost every way. Possibly the only thing it lacks is the synchronization feature. But I don't use that anyway.

    Here are the things I like about Zim over Tomboy:

  • it's a lighter program without heavy dependencies
  • documents are stored in plain text (with minor markups) in easily accessible directories, making it easier to back up
  • much improved document formatting, including embedding of pictures
  • word count tool
  • intuitive and accessible organization



    Overall, it feels like a good mix of Tomboy and Gedit.

  • Default paper size in Evince

    Evince is a very useful part of the default Ubuntu installation. It's a viewer that's able to handle practically any type of document. However it has one small but persistent shortcoming: it automatically assumes that I will be using A4 size documents. Ordinarily not a problem with viewing, but another story when printing.

    I've been bearing with this "feature" for the longest time, but really, enough is enough. I shouldn't have to reset my paper size every time I want to print something.

    The solution, it turns out, is simple.

    Apparently, Evince determines the paper size based on the locale. For some reason, it assumes that the Philippines uses primarily A4 paper. Nothing could be further from the truth: here, US Letter is king.

    To get Evince to use another default paper size, you edit your ~/.profile file. This is where you put in custom settings.

    At the end of the file, just add the following:

    export LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8@letter"

    Then, log out and log back in.

    Fire up Evince, and voila! Default paper size is now US Letter.


    Arranging pages for chapbook printing

    I once had a project to print out a 120-page booklet. Since it was a limited run, the cheapest way to do it was to print it on letter-size paper, back-to-back, with two pages per side. Then, staple them down the middle. Now, the question is: how do you print the document so that when you staple them right down the middle, the pages come out in proper order?

    For the simplest case, a 4-page document, the pages should print in the following order: 4, 1, 2, 3. Printed two pages to a sheet face, back-to-back on a single sheet, when you fold them down the middle, you get the pages in correct order.

    For the more complicated case, an 8-page document, you need to print the pages in the following order: 8, 1, 2, 7, 6, 3, 4, 5.

    But what about for 120 pages?

    For that, I wrote a simple Python program.

    #!/usr/bin/python

    import sys

    def arrangeForBookPrinting(pages):
    if pages % 4 != 0:
    pages=(pages / 4 + 1) * 4
    p1=0
    s=""
    for p2 in range(pages,pages/2,-1):
    p1=p1+1
    p2
    if p1 % 2 == 1:
    s = s + str(p2) + "," +str(p1) + ","
    else:
    s = s + str(p1) + "," +str(p2) + ","
    return s[:-1]

    if __name__=="__main__":
    print arrangeForBookPrinting(int(sys.argv[1]))


    The program takes the number of pages as an argument (non-multiples of 4 are accepted, but the program rounds it up.)

    To process the printing, I use page-crunch, a GUI utility front end to psutils that lets you print a document in any order.

    Printing envelopes

    Something that you never think about, until you actually have to go and do it: printing envelopes. How do you do it in Ubuntu?

    Now, the usual solutions that come to mind are OpenOffice.org and Abiword. They look obvious, but they don't really work. Believe me, I've tried. Like a tease, Abiword will let you create an envelope sized document, but when you try printing it, you'll be out of luck.

    The solution: glabels.

    Actually, glabels should fall under the category of a graphics program. It gives you tight control of how you print on your document. Text, for example, can be any size, any font, and any orientation.

    More than that, it comes ready with several hundred preprogrammed label options for different kinds and different sizes of gum labels. Very nifty.

    But as to printing the envelope itself? glabels doesn't have an envelope document, per se, but you can simply position your label on a regular letter size paper (some trial-and-error required) so that it comes out right when you finally print it on the actual envelope.

    Simple, yet neat!

    Tested this on an Epson C90, by the way.

    Mail merge in Abiword

    A little mundane but I had to print out fifty personalized letters for our music studio. The quick solution, of course, is to use mail merge. However, for the life of me, I could quite figure out OpenOffice.org's mail merge function, not even with the Mail Merge Wizard.

    Rather than bang my head on that, I decided to use Abiword instead.

    Even on Abiword, mail merge isn't nearly as intuitive as I would like it. For one thing, the actual merging must be done on the command line. Fortunately, there's a good instruction page on mail merge over at the official Abiword web site.

    In a nutshell, here are the steps I took for mail merge:

    1. Create a CSV (comma separated value) file of the source data (in my case, student names and parent names). I did this in Gnumeric and simply exported out.
    2. On the Abiword menu, click on Insert->Mail Merge Field.... This will bring up the mail merge dialog box.


    3. On the dialog box, click on "Open File" and select the source data. This will then make the fields available for selection.
    4. Insert fields at the proper locations.
    5. Save the file.
    6. To actually run the merge:

    abiword -m mergeme.csv -p mergeme.ps mergeme.abw

    where mergeme.csv is the source data, mergeme.ps is the output file, and mergeme.abw is the document with the merge fields.

    This will produce a postscript file, mergeme.ps, which can be viewed prior to printing.

    Writeroom for Linux (for real)

    Nowhere Man pointed me out to PyRoom, a more faithful implementation of WriteRoom that's written in Python. It invalidates much of what I wrote earlier, but I'm happy because it validates the very existence of this blog.

    PyRoom is better than my previous suggestions because it really does use up the whole screen but still puts in the aesthetically-pleasing padding on the left and the right of the text area. It's a GUI application so you don't need to go into console mode. Its command keys are also more sensible. It supports multiple buffers (which you scroll through using Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn).

    There are a couple of caveats to using the current version of PyRoom, however:


  • it doesn't bother to confirm when you quit (Ctrl-Q); it just exits, and not just the buffer your working on but all buffers
  • there is no autosave function
  • there's no block editing function

    Still, it's a pretty nifty piece of work. I can see why folks are raving over WriteRoom. Then again, WriteRoom does cost almost $30 so PyRoom is a no-brainer choice any day. PyRoom's tagline, incidentally, is "Why shouldn't it be free?"

    You can't install PyRoom from the repositories just yet. You will have to download it manually as a tarball.

    Once downloaded, follow these steps to install PyRoom on your system:


    tar xzvf pyroom-0.1.tar.gz

    chmod ugo+x pyroom-0.1/pyroom.py

    sudo mv pyroom-0.1/pyroom.py /usr/bin/pyroom


    Now you can invoke pyroom from the terminal at any time. You can also add PyRoom to your applications menu or menu bar.
  • WriteRoom for Linux

    Okay, I'm only kidding. There is no WriteRoom for Linux, but with my suggestions here you can probably get a similar effect under Ubuntu.

    WriteRoom is a word processor for the Mac whose claim to fame is its simple no-frills full-screen text editing. It received a lot of mileage thanks to Lifehacker, a personal productivity website. WriteRoom was so successful that it spawned a Windows clone called DarkRoom.

    WriteRoom, which I'll admit I've never used, essentially brings us back to the future. Full-screen text editing seems so sweet after the barrage of menus and icons that's present in most word processing packages nowadays (even with OpenOffice.org and Abiword). But that was the norm for word processors back in the early days of personal computing, the apex of which I'll claim was WordPerfect 5.1.

    So how to get the WriteRoom effect on Ubuntu? To begin with, Ubuntu, as with many Linux distributions, comes with several text editors and they all have full screen modes. vim and emacs come to mind immediately. However, vim and emacs are not exactly user-friendly for the casual Ubuntu user.

    The good news is that there are other word processors in Ubuntu that you can configure to get a WriteRoom-like environment. Here are three alternatives:

    1) JOE
    JOE, which stands for Joe's Own Editor. JOE was written by Joseph Allman back in the 1990s and came with many Linux distributions. Not nearly as ubiquitous as vi, but a tad friendlier to use. JOE makes use of Wordstar-like key combinations (remember Wordstar?), probably not the best choice but easy enough to remember once you get the hang of it.

    JOE is a great choice if you like working in console mode. Yes, it runs in full screen, in all its 80x24 characters. If you don't particularly like the default JOE color combination, you can change it by copying /etc/joe/joerc configuration to your home directory and renaming it .joerc. It also is possible to get rid of the information status bar on the first line. Read through the configuration file and enable the options you like. More on this in the future.

    JOE is not on a default Ubuntu installation. You can install it via

    sudo apt-get install joe


    2) Gedit
    Gedit is otherwise known as Text Editor in Ubuntu. While it doesn't boast of a full-screen mode, you can maximize it and get plenty of writing real estate. It is possible to change the colors so you can get green-on-black.

    No need to install anything as it's part of Gnome, the windowing system for Ubuntu.


    3) Abiword
    If you really want a full featured word processor but with the simplicity of WriteRoom, you can run Abiword in full screen mode. Just press F11. If you don't want to see the simulated paper edges, you can edit in Web Layout mode (View->Web Layout). If you really want WriteRoom's green-on-black color scheme, you can change your font and background colors under Edit->Preferences.

    Caveats with using Abiword this way: you lose your flashing cursor and Abiword still introduces gaps in the page breaks.

    You can get a similar effect with OpenOffice.org Writer. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

    There is also a web-based alternative, if you're always online: Writer, explicitly written as a clone for WriteRoom.

    Timer applet

    A stopwatch is a handy thing to have around, be it for boiling an egg or timing your exercise period or any other activity which you need to limit to a set period. That's why I keep one on my Ubuntu desktop. It tells me when to disconnet from my mobile Internet GPRS connection (P10, or $0.20 for 30-minute blocks) and as a blogging discipline (15 minutes per blog entry, though so far I'm failing miserably.)

    The generically-named timer-applet fills this purpose quite nicely. It's part of the Gnome desktop though not it's not installed with Ubuntu by default.

    The timer applet docks on the Ubuntu toolbar, out of the way but easily accessible when you need it. Click it to open its dialog box, where you specify how long a period you want. Periods are either entered manually or via customizable presets. Once started, the timer applet shows you via the toolbar how much time remains.

    Right-click on the applet icon to reveal its Preferences menu. One thing you'll want to do is change the sound. The default alarm is simply far too soft to hear. I much prefer the loud and startling old-time phone ring from /usr/share/sounds/phone.wav.

    To install the timer applet:

    sudo apt-get install timer-applet

    Accents in Xubuntu

    Previously I covered accents and the compose key in Ubuntu. But can you do the same in Xubuntu? It's a good news and bad news situation.

    The good news is that, yes, you can define a compose key in Xubuntu. The bad news is that you have to do a bit of minor surgery on a configuration file.

    The configuration I wrote about earlier, it seems, is only good for Ubuntu and its Gnome desktop. On Xubuntu, which uses Xfce, you have to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf config file.

    Look for this code snippet:
    Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver "kbd"
    Option "CoreKeyboard"
    Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option "XkbLayout" "us"
    Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"
    EndSection


    and replace

    Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"

    with

    Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch,compose:rwin"

    This should assign the right Windows key to be the compose key. Operation is as documented previously.

    Enyes, umlauts, and other accents

    For the longest time I've been making do without the venerable Ñ, its mini-me, ñ, and its cousins ä, é, í, ô, ü, etc.

    If you write primarily in boring English that's not a difficult feat; but I realize that I've been turning my back on my Spanish heritage as well as murdering the name of the occasional friend. Fortunately, no one's wised up yet. But it's behooves one not to wait.

    So today I decided to learn how to type accented characters in Ubuntu. Remarkably easy, actually, it's just that I've never really tried before.

    Just a quick recap: on Windows, you press Alt and follow that with the ASCII code of the character you want to type. Not exactly intuitive, I admit now, but I had gotten used to it. So I was wondering for a while why the same didn't work on Ubuntu.

    Answer: it's actually slightly more intuitive in Ubuntu, but one has to enable it. To do accents, you need to define a compose key.

    To do that, click on System->Preferences->Keyboard. That should bring up the Keyboard dialog. Then go to the Layout Options tab.

    Choose which key you want to assign as your Compose key. (Finally! A sensible use for the otherwise offensive Windows key -- except that my Thinkpad keyboard doesn't have one, so I've had to use the right Alt key.)

    So now, to create an Ñ, for example, press your assigned Compose key (in this case, Right-Alt), N, and the tilde ~ and the desired letter should appear!

    Easy!

    The others are just as easy: ä is the compose key followed by a and "; é is the compose key followed by e and '.

    Word of caution: so far, I have only tried this with Ubuntu and not with other variants.