How to put a watermark text on your documents

I know at least three ways you can put a watermark text in your documents:

• Background image
• Drawing text
• Insert Fontwork

1) Background image
Select your page style in the style navigator. Right click and choose Modify.
Select the Background tab and select Graphics in the first field.
Now you can select an image file from your system.
You can either stretch the image or place it on a specific position.

2) Drawing text
From the Toolbar Drawing, select the tool Text.
Draw a box with you mouse and type the text in the box
If you want to see the background text on all pages, you can draw the box in the page header or footer
Mark the text in the box and format it as you need (text size, font, color etc.)
If you mark the text, you can use the rotate tool to rotate the text (grab the corners with your mouse and drag)
Mark the text box and right click. Select Arrange. Select In background

3) Fontwork
Click once in the page header og footer
Click Fontwork Gallery and select a Fontwork style
Type the text you want to appear in the background
Select the inserted Fontwork, right click and select Wrap - In background

Conclusion

Each of the above methods has advantages and disadvantages. Choose from your needs in the individual case. There might even be other methods to achieve the same or better results.

Search the Internet form OpenOffice.org

Very often when you are working with text documents in Writer, you need to do some research or look up a word on the Internet while you are writing. You can actually look up words on the Internet directly from OpenOffice.org bur very few people has yet discovered this handsome feature in the application.

Some general search sites are predefined in OpenOffice.org, e.g. AltaVista, Gogle and Yahoo, but you can also define your own searches. I often use the Mariam-Webster on-line dictionary to look up English words.

How to define a new search

First you have to find out how the search site parses the search string in the URL address. Try to make a simple search on the search site and the take a look at the URL address when you see the result. On Mariam-Webster it looks like this:

The word I was looking up here was 'accent'.

Now copy the URL string and open OpenOffice.org Writer

Select Tools – Options – Internet – Search

Create a new search and paste the URL from the clipboard into the 'prefix' field.

Select 'Or' and do the same again

Select 'Exact' and do the same again.

Close the Options dialog.

How to search from OpenOffice.org

If the toolbar “Hyperlink bar” is not visible in OpenOffice.org you should make it visible by selecting View – Toolbars and then select “Hyperlink bar”.

Now you are ready to look up any word from your document. Select a word in the text and you will see that the word is now automatically filled in the first field on the Hyperlink bar.

Now you just need to click the search icon and select the search site you want to use. In this case I select M-W and my browser will immediately show me the search result.

Conclusion

OpenOffice.org has lots and lots of secret features and this is one of them. Very few people will discover all features, but if you try to have a look around the application you will find lots of them.

I can recommend Solveig Hauglands blog. She has made a lot of small tricks and how-tos.

Translation (press release)

Wide agreement about open standards
(Unofficial translation of the press release)

03.10.2007

The government KL (Danish Municipals ) and Danish Regions has made an agreement about the application from obligatory, open standards for software there public sector.

Before the summer the Minister of Science and technology and the Parliament (Folketinget) agreed on a schedule plan for adopting the open standards. The schedule and the adoption of the first part of obligatory , open standards is validated by a government decision and is actually validated by an agreement between the government, KL and Danish Regions.

The agreement implies , that public authorities from January 1th. 2008 shall apply seven sets of open standards in connection with new it - systems, unless that results in extra expenses. All authorities shall contemporary be able to receive text documents as two open standards (EOOXML and ODF).

Obligatory , open defaults shall :
- support contest and options on the software markedet
- give rise to the assumption by context between it - systems, solutions and organisations
- secure bigger effectiveness and better problem solving.

later that year there will be a conference about the adoption af open standards in the public sector.

The government KL and Danish regions has agree to continuously take standardization into account and adopt open standards. It will secure against connections across the public sectors and ensure competition, innovation and a multiple software market to the best for development of the digital governance.

Minister of Science and technology Helge Sander:
”This agreement means, that vi actually seriously has set of to adopt open standards. Denmark is already leading at this field and therefore every new steps we take, give echo abroad. I expects , that the citizen and the businesses will experience, that there will be further options , and that they digital solutions proves better connectivity and is more user friendly.”

Chairman of KL Erik Fabrin:
”For the municipals the agreement is an importantly step in the right direction. I am persuaded, that the use of open it standards is the access to a better working public sector, where we can be give citizen better consecutive services and better accessibility. I also expects, that an enhanced adoption of open standards will make it less expensive to exchange data between authorities and make it easier for new businesses to come in at the public it market with new solutions. However the agreement itself is not doing that. We must make an effort in all parts of public sector and use resources push that development."

Charman of Danish regions Bent Hansen:
”The regions are pleased to have been a part of this agenda in relationship to the adoption of open standards. The demands on accessibility will as an example help that all inhabitants , also persons with disabilities, can benefit of the digitalization of the public sector. The agreement shows that the public sector in cooperation can handle improvement of an important task and take commitment to the future digital development."

Progress in Denmark

The last few days shown a few interesting news.

The Danish Government has made an agreement with Danish Municipals ( http://www.kl.dk ) and Danish Regions ( http://www.regioner.dk ) about how open standards should be implemented in the public sector. This press release is in Danish:
http://videnskabsministeriet.dk/site/forside/nyheder/pressemeddelelser/2007/bred-aftale-om-aabne-standarder
My own unofficial translation here.
A lot of details about the implementation has been published here: http://videnskabsministeriet.dk/site/forside/nyheder/Aktuelle-temaer/aabne-standarder/bilag e.g. these manuals for the offices: http://www.oio.dk/aabnestandarderforsoftware .

The Minister of finance has been asked to reveal how much the Danish state is paying Microsoft each year ( http://www.computerworld.dk/art/41817 ). The Minister (Thor Pedersen) claims that these numbers is impossible to collect. This is rubbish, because the sate has a centralized purchase of software licenses.

Several Members of the Danish Parliament wants to liberate the scholar system from Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft is offering a 70% discount to schools and universities but despite that, the bill is too high. And the MP know that monopoly in schools will keep the Microsoft monopoly in the rest of the country, both public and private sector. http://www.computerworld.dk/art/41789
The reason for this discussion is an article ( http://www.computerworld.dk/art/41785 ) that covers the fact that using Linux in the schools is more expensive than Windows. But the actual cause for that fact is, that Linux support is very expensive today. Why ? Because not many customers are using it. If the schools could gather together and collaborate about a common solution and establish a support center, it would be much cheaper.

What is nearly grotesque is that the agreement between the government and the Danish Municipals specifically mentions schools, hospitals and public libraries as not covered by the agreement. So what is it worth, when my children don't get the opportunity to learn about OpenOffice.org and open standards at school. They will end up as Microsoft users just like the previous generation. When they get on the job market, they will ask for Microsoft applications.

Sorry that all my references are in Danish. I'll try to find some time to translate to English one of these days.

Extending OpenOffice.org

Sorry, I have been away from my blog for a few days.

This summer I wrote a Danish manual about extensions and how to create and maintain extensions( http://doc.oooforum.dk/Extensions.pdf ). When I wrote the manual, I used both the wiki on http://www.OpenOffice.org : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Extensions . I also used two articles by Dimitri Popov (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7802 and http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9412).

Dimitri is using an example in his article, where he is creating dummy text with Lorem Ipsum. I remember, that it was annoying that the example was masde as a mock up as example and didn't actually create Lorem Ipsum text. I know that this was not the purpose of the article, but I was still thinking: "Why not do it ?".

I have never made a macro in OpenOffice.org before, so I took this as a challenge. I had to find out everything from the beginning and I has some difficulties extracting data from the XML stream. The solution is a little clumsy, I will admit that. If any of you know a better and more elegant way, please feel free to make a new macro.

There is still a few other issues , but I expect to get them solved over the next few weeks.

I have uploaded the solution as extension to the repository, but it's actually not published yet. You can find the odt-file here: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/download/288

When you have installed the extension, you will see a new tool bar with a button. This button will call http://www.lipsum.com/ give you some dummy text. Not rocket science, but anyway a helpfull feature.

Thanks to DannyB for this description of how to parse an XML stream http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=4907 and to Andrew Pitonyak for his dokumentation "Useful Macro Information".