The new OpenOffice::OODoc distribution, V 1.203, is available from CPAN
today.
It's an Expat-based Perl extension allowing direct read/write access to
OpenOffice.org (XML) documents. It provides an object representation of
the OOo documents, with a lot of methods to get, create, update or
delete any content or presentation element, and attempts to hide the
most part of the complex XPath navigation. This toobox is an XML API
that deal with the physical files (compressed XML), and never uses the
OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice) product. It allows document processing
where no desktop software is installed, and requires a Perl 5.8
environment only (so the same scripts can be deployed on Win32, Linux,
Solaris, HP-UX, Mac and other platforms).
The most recent new features are:
- While the previous releases allowed only read/write operations in
previously existing documents, the present one can create new OOo
documents from scratch; the user has just to provide an additional
"create" option giving the document class in the main object
constructor. For ex, to create a new spreadsheet (i.e. OpenOffice Calc)
document that will be stored in a "doc.sxc" file, the constructor is:
my $doc = ooDocument
(
file => "doc.sxc",
create => "spreadsheet"
);
The new documents are generated from a set of XML templates; if needed,
each application can select user-provided templates instead of the
default ones
- The createImageElement() method has been improved to allow easy image
import in drawing and presentation documents as well as in text or
spreadsheet documents. Ex:
$doc->createImageElement
(
"Mountain",
description => "The Kilimanjaro",
page => 3,
position => "4.2cm, 5cm"
size => "3cm, 4cm",
style => "MyGraphics",
import => "C:\MyImages\Mountain.jpg"
);
- The OOo date fields (stored in ISO-8601 format) can be easily
translated to/from Perl localtime() dates, due to new conversion functions;
- Symbolic color names (like "blue" or "yellow") and not only raw
hexadecimal RGB codes, are allowed for text and background colors. So,
to color in dark blue with a yellow background every paragraph or item
matching "OpenOffice" (or any other string or regex), the code is more
readable:
# define the colored style
$doc->createTextStyle
(
"Outstanding",
properties =>
{
'fo:color' => rgb2oo("dark blue"),
'fo:background-color' => rgb2oo("yellow")
}
);
# give the colored style to the selected elements
$doc->setStyle($_, "Outstanding")
for $doc->selectElementsByContent("OpenOffice");
- Bug fixes and functional improvements in the localization; the local
character sets seems to be properly supported; the user's local
character (iso-8859-1 by default) can be selected either at the
installation level or separately in each application.
The previous text-focused methods (search/replace/create/remove) are
unchanged.
Please see http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice-OODoc for details
Thanks for comments
JMG http://jean.marie.gouarne.online.fr
