Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 12:26 pm Post subject: New User Queries
I've been trying to find some way of finally exorcising Microsoft from my Mac for ages. I tried an earlier version of OpenOffice, and didn't like it. Recently I tried OO again - and found myself in a long running battle with XDarwin to get the thing to run.
I spent 16 years as a Unix support professional. I thought I'd left all that behind, thanks very much.
Then I was pointed to NeoOfficeJ. I downloaded it, got it running and it seems to be doing the trick wonderfully. Many thanks and congratulations, guys.
I have three small griefs with it at the moment, probably all caused by my ignorance. But I'd be very obliged if someone could show me how to correct them.
1. When I convert an MS Office document to NeoOffice the icon for the document is unchanged except, sometimes, a darker border. Is this right? It makes it hard to tell which documents I've converted and which I still have to work on.
2. My text documents have a number of user styles. When I open one of them in NeoOffice for the first time the only styles that seem to be available are those that have already been used in the document. Is there a way of pulling in the others without saving as Word, putting in a line in the new style and re-opening in NeoOffice?
3. When I highlight a section (say, to copy it) the highlight colour is black. It makes it hard to see the text, and to be honest I don't like it. Can I change the highlighting colour at all (and I have found the highlighting icon, but that seems to apply only to unselected text.
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 6:02 am Post subject: Re: New User Queries
1. I'm not entirely sure what you are describing here - I am going to guess that you are saving your Office .doc files opened in NO/J as .doc files once you have edited them? If so, it is the OS that is applying the icon to the file, not NO/J and you presumably have .doc files assigned to MS Office. If you convert them from .doc to the NO/J (i.e. OOo) format, .sxw, they will gain the NO/J icon for the file.
2. Again, I'm not entirely sure what the issue is - your custom styles in your Word documents are not appearing in the list of styles in NO/J? Have you tried showing All Styles? Turn the "Stylist" on (one of the toolbar buttons or from the Format menu) and choose the "All Styles" option from the drop down menu. Or choose the appropriate set of styles you wish to see. Does that work?
3. As far as I know there isn't currently a way to do this... perhaps it is something Patrick could change at a later date, but for now, it probably means you will be stuck with the white on black selection highlight. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 8:06 am Post subject: Re: New User Queries
JKT wrote:
I'm not entirely sure what you are describing here - I am going to guess that you are saving your Office .doc files opened in NO/J as .doc files once you have edited them? If so, it is the OS that is applying the icon to the file, not NO/J and you presumably have .doc files assigned to MS Office. If you convert them from .doc to the NO/J (i.e. OOo) format, .sxw, they will gain the NO/J icon for the file.
As a long-term Mac user I'm allergic to file extensions (nasty Microsoft imposition) and remove them (NOT hide them) from every file I create. I have now managed to get NO/J icons for the relevant files by saving them with the correct .sx? extension, then hiding that, but I'm very disappointed that I can't manage it WITHOUT having to have a file extension.
JKT wrote:
Again, I'm not entirely sure what the issue is - your custom styles in your Word documents are not appearing in the list of styles in NO/J? Have you tried showing All Styles? Turn the "Stylist" on (one of the toolbar buttons or from the Format menu) and choose the "All Styles" option from the drop down menu. Or choose the appropriate set of styles you wish to see. Does that work?
Nope. I've just tried - even creating an NO/J document from a template, then taking some of the styled lines out of the template also takes them out of the list of styles. I can still find them from the "Stylist", but I'd like all the styles known to the document available in the list, so that I can pick a new style easily. For example I separate sections in my writing by a double-spaced line of three asterisks. I have a style for that. I do NOT want to have to put that line at the top of every new file so that I can invoke it when I want it. This, so far, is one of the worst aspects of NO/J that I have found.
JKT wrote:
As far as I know there isn't currently a way to do this... perhaps it is something Patrick could change at a later date, but for now, it probably means you will be stuck with the white on black selection highlight.
I can live with it, but I'd very much like to see it changed. It means I have one selection colour for NO/J and one for the rest of my Mac. Spoils the interface to my mind.
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 12:29 pm Post subject: Re: New User Queries
owenkc wrote:
As a long-term Mac user I'm allergic to file extensions (nasty Microsoft imposition) and remove them (NOT hide them) from every file I create. I have now managed to get NO/J icons for the relevant files by saving them with the correct .sx? extension, then hiding that, but I'm very disappointed that I can't manage it WITHOUT having to have a file extension.
As a long-time Mac user also, I'd really like to see this (setting type and creator codes for files, which is still recommended by Apple even though they fail to do so in most of their apps), too. I'm not sure what sort of code actually handles the saving interaction with the HFS Plus filesystem (my guess, based on the alias vs symlink issue, is that it's OOo code), but I can only begin to fathom the amount of hacking of the OOo code that would need to be done to get this working.
If I were you, I'd file an enhancement request in the Neo Bugzilla to get it on Patrick's radar (and to get his response; if Patrick says it's an OOo problem, file a bug against the Porting project in the OOo Issuezilla) but be aware that it probably will have low priority.
I've sorta made peace of with the fact that great Mac innovations like type/creator are being ignored in OS X but I really wish they weren't.
Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 9:06 am Post subject: Re: New User Queries
sardisson wrote:
As a long-time Mac user also, I'd really like to see this (setting type and creator codes for files, which is still recommended by Apple even though they fail to do so in most of their apps), too. I'm not sure what sort of code actually handles the saving interaction with the HFS Plus filesystem (my guess, based on the alias vs symlink issue, is that it's OOo code), but I can only begin to fathom the amount of hacking of the OOo code that would need to be done to get this working.
Filing feature requests in Bugzilla is recommended as I completely forgot about the whole alias vs. symlink issue.
As for type and creator codes, I can probably set the creator code to NO%F (I registered NO%F with Apple almost a year ago) but I can't set a type code. This should will be enough to open OOo files (e.g. sxw, sxi, etc.) without extensions but you may have trouble opening non-OOo files (e.g. RTF, PSD, etc.) without extensions since the OOo code for those file types heavily relies on the file extension.
Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 12:35 pm Post subject: Re: New User Queries
pluby wrote:
Filing feature requests in Bugzilla is recommended as I completely forgot about the whole alias vs. symlink issue.
On that particular issue, I guess my understanding then was that it was an OOo issue, so I filed a bug in the OOo IssueZilla back in June. Terry replied that it was something that wouldn't happen until Aqua OOo, so I figured that was that
Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 12:53 pm Post subject: Re: New User Queries
sardisson wrote:
On that particular issue, I guess my understanding then was that it was an OOo issue, so I filed a bug in the OOo IssueZilla back in June. Terry replied that it was something that wouldn't happen until Aqua OOo, so I figured that was that
Most likely, this is because OOo is not installed as a native Mac OS X application package so there is no creator code to lookup and set the file to.
In contrast, Neo/J is a native application so implementing this is much easier for me.
Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 7:10 pm Post subject: Re: New User Queries
pluby wrote:
sardisson wrote:
On that particular issue, I guess my understanding then was that it was an OOo issue, so I filed a bug in the OOo IssueZilla back in June. Terry replied that it was something that wouldn't happen until Aqua OOo, so I figured that was that
Most likely, this is because OOo is not installed as a native Mac OS X application package so there is no creator code to lookup and set the file to.
In contrast, Neo/J is a native application so implementing this is much easier for me.
Patrick
Oops, I was referring to the symlink issue in my post, not the the creator code one. But I wasn't clear.
I made an incorrect statement in my previous posting. Instead of setting the creator to "NO%F", I am setting the file type to "NO%F".
Patrick, that seems backward to me. Shouldn't you be setting the creator code of anything NeoJ saves to "NO%F" and the file type code to whatever it should be? (Existing "WD8N", "XLS8", "PPT3", "TEXT", "RTF ", etc. for the MS and Mac-standard kinds of files, and newly-created file types--period-extension, e.g. ".SXW", is a pretty easy way to create all these types--for the OOo/SO kinds of files?)
That way 1) the files will have the correct icon if one removes the extension (currently all files end up with the .sxd icon when you remove the extension) and
2) Other apps that can open certain kinds of files (html, rtf, doc, txt, xls, etc.) will be able to open the files without any difficult user work-arounds (currently, with the "NO%F" type code and no extension, "Open With" won't list the other apps that can open a file, and drag-drop onto the app icon won't work, either).
I guess this would also mean you'd have to add all the existing file type codes to NeoJ plist in addition to the "newly-created" ones, becuase drag/drop and "Open With" currently don't allow/list NeoJ for docs with existing correct file types and no extensions (I thought this used to work, though).
I don't know how difficult this might be, but it seems to me that if you're able to do this, then NeoJ would be fully compliant in the area of opening/saving files and displaying proper file icons The fact that you didn't do it, and instead set this "funny" filetype code, gives me a clue that I might off in wishful-thinking land on this one, though.
Patrick, that seems backward to me. Shouldn't you be setting the creator code of anything NeoJ saves to "NO%F" and the file type code to whatever it should be? (Existing "WD8N", "XLS8", "PPT3", "TEXT", "RTF ", etc. for the MS and Mac-standard kinds of files, and newly-created file types--period-extension, e.g. ".SXW", is a pretty easy way to create all these types--for the OOo/SO kinds of files?)[/quote]
In theory, that would be the ideal way. However, in the OOo code there is a library where all file open, create, etc. functions are. Since these functions are Unix file functions, all that I have to work with is the file name and whether it is to be created if it does not exist. The mapping of file name to document type is scattered throughout the 500 MB of OOo source code and it would be a hurculean task to track down all of the places that these mappings occur. As a result, I set file type to "NO%F" as a workaround.
It's not ideal, but I think it's better than what we had before. If the consensus that setting the file type to "NO%F" causes more harm than good, then I am more than willing to remove the change.
The mapping of file name to document type is scattered throughout the 500 MB of OOo source code and it would be a hurculean task to track down all of the places that these mappings occur. As a result, I set file type to "NO%F" as a workaround.
I was afraid something like that was the case I figured you had a good reason for doing it the way you did. Oh well.
Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 11:44 pm Post subject: Thanks!
In all of my "fluster" over the creator vs type codes, I failed to notice you did fix the open/save boxes not following Mac aliases issue, too. (It's still a little wonky because NeoJ acts like the file/folder is in the location where the alias is (i.e. if you follow an alias to a folder several levels down and then want to back up one level to find other docs/folders where the aliased folder lives, you instead go back to where the alias lives. But I can live with that, since the aliases actually work.) Thanks, Patrick!
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum