Star Office

[paradox]

Great! Glad it got to working...so what did you do exactly to get it working? When you set up your printer it all came together??? weird!

Aragorn

[mrkeef]

Here's the blow by blow description!

1. I downloaded the packages ttfutils and ttf2pt1. The ttf2pt1 is a program which converts True Type to Type 1. Unfortunately it will only do one at a time, but there is a think in the ttfutils package which uses ttf2pt1 but allows you to do a batch of files at once. If you use "make install" it will make these programs available in any dorectory.

2. I copied all my TT fonts from the Windows partition to a directory on my Linux partition. I changed to the directory with the fonts in them and then used the ttfutils program ttf2type1 (ttf2type1 *.ttf). This will quickly produece the files *.pbf and *.afm.

3. I copied the Type 1 font files to Office51/fonts/Type1 which is where Star Office keeps its type 1 fonts.

4. I then used SPAdmin which is the program SO uses to set up the fonts. Open the program (in Office51/bin) or use "Setup Printer" on the desk top.

5. Click "Add fonts" then "Initialize fon paths". Clilck on the directory path with the Type 1 fonts.then click OK. If oyu don't want to add them all, Remove the ones you don't want. Then cliick close a few tiomes to close the dialog boxes, and you're done.

6. The only thing left to do is make sure that the fonts are available to X. I use xfs so this meant editing the file /etc/X11/fs/config and ensuring that Office51/fonts/truetype was listed there.

7. Restart both xfs and Star Office and the fonts should be there in the list of fonts used by Star Office. They should appear normally on the screen.

It looks complicated but it's not too hard. I think earlier I may have clicked buttons in SPAdmin that I shouldn't have, and that might have casued osme of the problems. SPAdmin actually edits the fonts.dir file as part of its process so it can be disastrous to try some editing of fonts without knowing what you are doing!

: :

[paradox]

Thats cool, I'll have to give it a whirl. I really wish the community would do a bit to improve the quality of our current fonts. I don't know if it is the video drivers that distort them, or if it just the actual fonts being crappy, or what. If it was the fonts being crappy I say we get a small group of people together here, get a font editor and chug out some fonts for the community....I'd be all about it!

Aragorn

[Henry_Mars]

I use StarOffice to create form letters. These formletters must use data from the StarOffice spreadsheet. Is it possible to merge this data directly from the spreadsheet into the form letters? This is driving me nutz.
I am about to dump everything M$ and this is holding up the "works" ( no pun intended ) .

[JimH]

From the Star-Office help:

OLE objects cannot be inserted or moved to other applications via the clipboard or drag & drop in or out of StarOffice. On the other side, OLE- Objects can be inserted in StarOffice but they loose their link. That means you will still be able to edit them with a double click but you won't be able to update them when the source changes.
Which means you would have to manually change the form letter everytime the spreadsheet was updated. Maybe they will correct this in StarOffice 6. I saw the beta for StarOffice 6 is supposed to be out in October.