Sonny Software

Hey Jon,

Do you have any plans to add support to Bookends for scanning the Open Document format? I'm migrating to OpenOffice/NeoOfficeJ for my word processing, and it would be great to be able to scan in the Open Document format (which is now the native format for OpenOffice), rather than covert my documents to rtf. Even better, it would be great if you could offer a plugin for OpenOffice/NeoOfficeJ Writer!

FWIW, I successfully copied citations from my Bookends database into NeoOffice/J Writer, saved the document in rtf format, scanned with Bookends and pasted the formatted citations from the clipboard back into NeoOffice/J. All this was done on a TiBook running Panther. This works, but it would be nice to cut out a step or two.

Casey

P.S. I hadn't visited your site for a while. I really like the nifty new logo for Sonny Software!

casey wrote:Do you have any plans to add support to Bookends for scanning the Open Document format? I'm migrating to OpenOffice/NeoOfficeJ for my word processing, and it would be great to be able to scan in the Open Document format (which is now the native format for OpenOffice), rather than covert my documents to rtf. Even better, it would be great if you could offer a plugin for OpenOffice/NeoOfficeJ Writer!

Hi Casey,

No plans at the present. Does OO have a plug-in architecture similar to that of Word? Looking at their site I don't see any mention of this (or much else, actually)...

casey wrote:P.S. I hadn't visited your site for a while. I really like the nifty new logo for Sonny Software!

Thanks! It was contributed by one of our users.

Jon
Sonny Software

Hi,

I downloaded NeoOffice/j and I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed (slow, ugly, etc.). It does have an "add-on" capability (haven't downloaded the docs to see how), but it's not compatible with VBA. I may add automatic paste of copied citations (drag and drop works now), but probably not much else for now, at least.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:I downloaded NeoOffice/j and I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed (slow, ugly, etc.). It does have an "add-on" capability (haven't downloaded the docs to see how), but it's not compatible with VBA. I may add automatic paste of copied citations (drag and drop works now), but probably not much else for now, at least.

Jon
Sonny Software

Well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You should know, though, that NeoOffice/J is based on OpenOffice v.1. The new OpenOffice 2 (still in Beta, so not available in NeoOffice/J) has many improvements in terms of interface and features. OpenOffice2 (on Linux, not the X11 version for Mac) is a real pleasure to use. (For me at least.) I'm looking at migrating to Linux (while keeping one foot in the Mac world), so my interest in NeoOffice/J is purely to have a word processor that can natively read documents written on my Linux box, whether I use OOffice, KWord, AbiWord, whatever.

Adding auto copy and paste would be great, thanks! More importantly, though, would be the ability to have Bookends scan files in the Open Document format. That way I could easily use it with a variety of word processors, and I wouldn't need to save a separate copy of my document in rtf format just for scanning. I know rtf is the de facto universal standard for word processor documents now, but my understanding/feeling/prediction is that Open Document will become the new standard.

Casey

casey wrote:Adding auto copy and paste would be great, thanks!

Hm, I looked and there doesn't seem to be any AppleEvent support in NeoOffice. That makes it very tough.

casey wrote:More importantly, though, would be the ability to have Bookends scan files in the Open Document format. That way I could easily use it with a variety of word processors, and I wouldn't need to save a separate copy of my document in rtf format just for scanning. I know rtf is the de facto universal standard for word processor documents now, but my understanding/feeling/prediction is that Open Document will become the new standard.

I kind of doubt that, but who knows. FYI, if we could ever implement scanning from within OO/NeoOffice it would be via RTF (behing the scenes).

Jon
Sonny Software