There isn’t a built-in grammar checker in OpenOffice.org Writer. However, OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas blog describes how to install a grammar checker extension.

Once you download it, choose Tools > Extension Manager to install it.

Edocr allows you to upload and tag your documents. The community interacts with the uploaded document through ranking, commenting or writing to the publisher, embedding on to blogs, linking from other sites, and book marking to popular sites. The interaction generates feedback for publishers of documents, whilst providing a rich resource for knowledge seekers.

The website facilitates two types of users:

• Publishers of documents: Entities that publish documents to inform the society of products or services, or disseminate information through documents of interest such as periodicals.
• Knowledge seekers: Those who seek information through accessing and reading documents.

Currently there are over 500 articles available in the Edocr archives.

Every Monday Linux.com highlights a different extension, plugin, or add-on. Five OpenOffice.org extensions were presented last week.

Bookmarks Menu – an extension to add a menu like a favorits menu on the OpenOffice.org menubar. This extension is based on the idea of Malte Timmermann’s Favorites Menu. Favorites Menu is temporaly created menus but a menu created by BookmarksMenu extension is parmanent. But easy to remove it.

OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs – Export and Import your documents to Google Docs from OpenOffice.org, and from OpenOffice.org to Google Docs. Needs Java 6 to work.

Code Formatter – Source Code fragments in C++, Java, or StarBasic can be color coded for a better appearance. StarBasic is formatted to like like the OOo IDE. Java colors mimic those in Eclipse.

OOoSVN – A project to provide change control for OpenOffice.org documents (OpenDocument and *.sx*) via subversion. Transparently checks in internal changes in files and allows users to recover any previous version, view logs and compare with older versions. Works under Unix/Linux and Mac OSX.

mOOo Impress Controller – ava ME application (mobile) and a Java SE Add-On (desktop) that controls a slide presentation in OOo (OpenOffice.org) Impress. The user can switch slides (next and previous) while a timer (used for presentation controlling) is displayed on the screen.

Read the article here.

Linux Journal features a review of Scribus. Here are the author’s conclusions:

• Installation is a little tricky because it is not immediately clear how to get the latest version of Scribus
• Scribus handles most common file types correctly
• Tables are not handled elegantly
• Automatic text frames work best when the text to be inserted is more than a page or so long
• There does not seem to be any way to automatically apply formatting consistently to images and other graphics
• Scribus can be cautiously recommended as a capable page layout program
• It suffers, though, when compared to commercial page layout programs.

There are also interesting comments on the article. Here’s one of them:

We just finished our first Scribus based newsletter, this is from using PageMaker for the past 4 years and Ready Set Go before that. The transition wasn’t too bad, most of the work is settign up the new template and getting fonts Moved Over (Pagemaker was an OS9 version and Scribus is running in OSX). Without the nice plugins for gridspacing (now added to scribus) it took a little time on the spreadsheet to calculate my spacing. Setting up the paragraph styles was painless but necessary as applying formatting on the fly is a stumbling block for Scribus (and in some sense this is good, as it enforces consistency) File mangement is way different, as images cannot be embedded into the file like they could be with PageMaker, but once the concet was understood it was easy to transition. Spellchecking would be a nice feature which is in the works.

Our motivation for the transition? We could only afford the one License for PageMaker but could install scribus anywhere (and I can also edit on my Linux Laptop, which works fine BTW). From what I saw Scribus was kinda bad two years ago and now quite usable, who knows what improvements will be made by next year. If you want to compare look at our newsletters at http://www.hrcccr.org/pdfs.php - the January/February 2008 is from Scribus, older ones are from PageMaker- the massive size difference is due to images not scaled down before including (getting used to the new program). As far as color we print in B&W so that is also currently a non-issue for us. (Disclaimer - we don’t pretend to be professional DTP people.)

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. It supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

BlogCatalog

PDF Import feature will be available in the coming versions of OpenOffice.org suite. Here’s some information from OpenOffice.org Wiki:

Whenever a PDF is selected in the Open dialog and the PDF is not a Hyprid PDF then the user has to choose in which application (Writer, Impress, Draw) the PDF shall be imported. This is done by a subsequent dialog that shows up after the Open dialog has been dismissed.

A screenshot presenting PDF Import Options Dialog is provided:

Don’t Get Lost In Long Documents. LinuxPlanet gives some interesting KWord tips. Look through the article:

We’re going to learn some great shortcut for navigating long documents, some simple tricks for managing photo printing, and how to turn on KWord’s text-to-speech engine and make it read to you.

Read more: Text-to-Speech and Other KWord Tips.

LinuxPlanet has recently published short article on KWord – a word processor for KDE / Linux. Carla Schroder dive into KWord 1.6. Part two of the article will published later.

OpenOffice is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It’s cross-platform, and OpenOffice Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it’s not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we’re going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

Eweek.com has published a review of OpenOffice.org 2.3 office suite. The article provides detailed description of Impresspresentation tool.

Overall feelings of the author are rather positive:

OpenOffice.org 2.3 sports a nifty set of feature improvements, but the suite’s sweetest features remain its low cost (free) and its strikingly broad platform support.