User Documentation

The user documentation is split into the following parts:

Prerequisites

There are, unfortunately, zillions of possibilities why you cannot start OpenOffice.org as in background on a system.

The scripts in here were tested with Ubuntu and work.

It is mandatory, that the system user running oooctl is a regular user with at least a home directory. OpenOffice.org relies on that directory to store information even in headless mode.

Recent OpenOffice.org versions require no X-server for running.

If you want to use a Ubuntu (or Debian) prepared install of OOo, you must make sure, that you apt-get-installed the following packages:

• openoffice.org-headless (for Ubuntu < 9.04, not needed for newer)
• openoffice.org-java-common

additionally to the usual OOo packages, i.e.:

• openoffice.org (at least for Ubuntu >= 9.04)
• msttcorefonts

The latter is optional but needed to have the most common fonts used with OpenOffice.org documents available. Without the correct fonts installed, results of document transforms might be poor.

Then, you need at least one Python version, which supports:

$ python -c "import uno"

without raising any exceptions.

On newer Ubuntu versions you can install:

* ``python-uno`` (if available)

The clients and other software apart from the oooctl-server and the pyuno-server can be run with a different Python version.

If you successfully installed this package on a different system, we’d be glad to hear from you, especially, if you could tell, what system-packages you used.

Building

Using zc.buildout and SVN checkout

To use buildout with an SVN-checkout of the package from somwhere below

https://svn.gnufix.de/repos/main/ulif.openoffice/

First make sure, that you entered your UNO-supporting Python version in buildout.cfg. By default it will assume, that this is /usr/bin/python.

If:

$ /usr/bin/python -c "import uno"

gives an exception on your system, you must edit buildout.cfg, section [unopython], to tell where the supporting Python can be found.

Then run:

$ python bootstrap/bootstrap.py

with the Python version, your client should later run with. This can be the UNO-supporting Python but don’t has to.

This way you can, for example, use the client components with Python 2.4 while the ooo-server and pyuno-server will run with Python 2.6.

After running bootstrap.py, do:

$ ./bin/buildout

which will create all scripts in bin/.

Using easy_install

Instead of using zc.buildout you can also use easy_install.

If using easy_install, you might have to install the package twice: one time with a Python binary that support PyUNO and one time with a Python binary that will be used by your application.

1. Make sure, you have at least one Python version that supports PyUNO. See Prerequisites above.

2. For this Python-version install easy_install (only needed if not already existent, of course:

   $ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
   $ path/to/pyuno/supporting-python ez_setup.py

3. Install ulif.openoffice for this Python-version:

   $ path/to/pyuno/supporting-easy_install ulif.openoffice

4. Do the same for the Python-version used by your application:

   $ path/to/myapp/supporting-python ez_setup.py
   $ path/to/myapp/supporting-easy_install ulif.openoffice

It is generally useful to do this in virtualenv environments.

Using the scripts

There are four main components that come with ulif.openoffice:

• an oooctl-server that starts OpenOffice.org in background.
• a pyuno-server that listens for requests to convert docs. This server depends on a running oooctl-server.
• a client component that can be accessed via API and can talk to the pyuno-server. This way you can convert docs from Python and the Python version has not to provide the uno lib.
• a converter script (also in ./bin), you can use on the commandline. It depends on a running oooctl server and can convert docs to .txt, .html and .pdf format. It is merely a little test programme that was used during development, but you might have some use for it.

You can start the oooctl-server with:

$ ./bin/oooctl start

Do:

$ ./bin/oooctl --help

to see all options.

You can stop the daemon with:

$ ./bin/oooctl stop

The same applies to the pyuno-server:

$ ./bin/pyunoctl start
$ ./bin/pyunoctl --help
$ ./bin/pyunoctl stop

do what you think they do.

The converter script can be called like this:

$ ./bin/convert sourcefile.doc

to create a sourcefile.txt conversion.

Do:

$ ./bin/convert --pdf sourcefile.doc

to create a PDF of sourefile.doc, and:

$ ./bin/convert --html sourcefile.doc

to create an HTML version of sourcefile.doc.

For the client API see the .txt files in the source.