A Great OpenOffice Blog

I'm about to embark on a project that involves converting a large stack of handouts I've done in HTML over the years into a couple of books intended for publication both as eBooks and as dead-tree products. To do this, I need to convert these HTML files to PDFs that format properly, paginate well, look good from a type perspective, etc. In other words, I need a desktop publishing solution that plays nicely either with HTML or with some format to which I can easily convert HTML without headaches and lots of manual tweaking after the fact.

In my search, I ran into an Open Source DTP tool called Scribus that looks very promising. Some research suggests that it doesn't swallow HTML frogs particularly well (though it may not be too bad; I'm going ot run some tests later this weekend to see, I think). But Scribus imports Open Office format (.odt) documents and, as you may know if you've been hanging here for a while, I use OO to the exclusion of other office programs.

So I followed a couple of links and stumbled serendipitously into a marvelously useful and helpful blog maintained by Solveig Haugland, who has a rep as one of the premier Open Office trainers and writers on the planet. Wow. That blog has taught me about 15 new things in the first hour of exploring it.

If you're using OpenOffice (or its Mac clone NeoOffice, which I prefer and use daily), or if you're just thinking about switching from Micro$oft Offi$e to OO or NeoOffice, you really should take time to look over this wonderful work.

I'm off now to experiment with NeoOffice Writer to see if I can produce a book-quality PDF with it, directly or by importing from it into Scribus.

Oh, and Scribus has another nice feature: it's Python scriptable. Woohoo!