rock! (i.e., making OOo suck less, one bug at a time)

Posted on by Luis Villa

I was hoping to do something like this in OOo this summer, and couldn’t. So I filed a bug. Looks like that paid off. (I also got this one fixed earlier in the summer.) Big thanks to Jan and Caolan- it might not seem like much, but making it easier for people to make beautiful presentations is one solid step towards making people actually like OOo.

Now, if only there were s5 export :) (I love s5 as a machine-independent presentation format, but actually writing a good-looking presentation in it requires CSS I don’t have.)

Published by Luis Villa

6 thoughts on “rock! (i.e., making OOo suck less, one bug at a time)”

  3. Couple random thoughts, as I’ve used rst->s5 and impress as well. I’m not fully satisfied with either. s5 needs some love to bring it to up to keynote style rather than powerpoint style. Background images would be nice. It doesn’t seem to be getting any love. ReST makes it nice to embed code (and get it highlighted via pygments) in s5. No easy way to do that in impress. Sometimes when using rst I pine for the wysiwyg of impress, one example is that single lines tend to be a little too high and small in rst. (Like I said it is more for a powerpoint style rather than keynote).

    My current process combines rst and inkscape. When I need anything vector I use inkscape. I’ve got it scripted so I can quickly export all images to the correct size.

    Why do you want s5 export, when pdf export seems to be more ideal? S5 still has issues when resizing the browser (on firefox at least).

    Dojo presentation perhaps could be useful. It’s still experimental, but the dojo folks seem to be of the apple/keynote mindset.

    Ideally I’d like rst2[s5|impress|dojopreso] with keynote style picture backgrounds and big letters.

    Why did you file the bug with RH instead of upstream? (Has RH forked OOo that much?) Or is it just a passthrough mechanism?

  4. Matt: filed downstream (1) because my experience with upstream OOo bug filing has been absymal and (2) because I was a RH non-engineering employee at the time, and I wanted to see what happened when bugs like that got filed by such a person.

    I like s5 over pdf mostly because of the superior multi-head behavior; no other real reason. Oh, and because evince is too slow to handle lessig-style presentations using pdfs, or at least was two years ago. I agree that s5 is still limited, but soooo vastly superior to what OOo does right now for html export :)

    Also- dojo? linky?

  5. (Hopefully OOo gets their act together, I think they still have a chance at the office suite until webbased or lighter weight suites (ala koffice) eat their pants)

    Interesting about evince being too slow, I was going to comment that I thought s5 was slow. But I much prefer writing slides in a text edit (using rst) than using a gui 95% of the time.

    Here’s your linky:
    http://trac.dojotoolkit.org/browser/dojox/trunk/presentation
    (sorry, forgot that navigating/finding anything in the dojo site is near impossible)
    It’s a link to the source but has a demo in the tests directory.

  6. Matt: note that when I say evince was too slow, I was abusing the fuck out of it with a variant of this very very large deck. Looks like it is still slightly too slow (needs to pre-cache more slides) but better than it was. (Of course, I’d probably do the slides in an even more graphics-abusing mechanism these days as well.)

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