[Zope] Zope & OpenOffice

[Joachim Werner]

Hi!

It's amazing to see all these suggestions. But I think that Dirk's approach
would in fact be the most elegant solution. That is, if somebody provides a
useable Python API to the OpenOffice XML filters.

Yes, you CAN do nice charts with GDChart, and ReportLab is another good
option. But have you ever tried to take an automatically generated (GIF or
JPG) chart from the web and manipulate it to fit your specific needs
(colour, size, etc.)?

With OpenOffice, this could all be a really easy: For displaying the chart
on the web site, you'll render it to GIF, PNG, or JPG. But people can also
download the (auto-generated) OpenOffice file and use OpenOffice to change
colors, switch from 3D pie charts to bar charts, etc.!

Another cool thing: You could create the template file for the chart using
OpenOffice, and then add some DTML (or TAL) variables to the code in Zope.

The whole thing also works with generating spreadsheet tables and word
processor files, but with the charts example it is most impressing.

The only tool that comes near to that would be ReportLab, because it uses an
XML description syntax. But there is no editor for that (at least no
non-commercial one), so it is a one-way thing.

With KDE's KOffice suite, the same things would be possible, but it is not
available for Windows, and it is still less advanced.

I have mentioned this a couple of times before: Guys, look at combining
OpenOffice (and/or KDE/KOffice) with Zope, and what you'll get is a dream
team: Full WYSIWYG editing clients for rich documents, export/import filters
(server-side) for most important file formats, etc.

The problem is: Who is going to provide the bindings for the OpenOffice
libraries? That would be the most important step to go.


Joachim

----- Original Message -----
From: <sean.upton@uniontrib.com>
To: <Dirk.Datzert@rasselstein-hoesch.de>; <zope@zope.org>
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 10:36 PM
Subject: RE: [Zope] Zope & OpenOffice


> Why not consider ReportLab, a Python library for doing just this kind of
> thing?  I have not used it, but if I understand correctly, tt has a
> chart-description XML language, and it can output PDF or (via PIL) a
JPG...
> http://www.reportlab.com
>
> Sean
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dirk Datzert [mailto:Dirk.Datzert@rasselstein-hoesch.de]
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 10:20 AM
> To: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] Zope & OpenOffice
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking around for Python-Code or Zope-Product which uses OpenOffice
> as a generator for Charts.
>
> The idea is to generate XML-OpenOffice-Code via Zope, transfer the
> dynamic document into OpenOffice and save it as HTML with JPGs. The JPGs
> should then be served via Zope as a chart-picture.
>
> Or the OpenOffice document could be converted into a MSOffice Document
> and downloaded via Zope.
>
> Regards,
> Dirk
>
>
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