What I love about Free Software [LWN.net]

What I love about Free Software

Posted Jan 12, 2006 19:28 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256)
Parent article: OOo Label Templates 1.0 Released

This is a great addition to OOo! We've had the gLabels package for years
and it's a fine lightweight applications (that supports hundreds of standard forms --- mostly Avery --- just for U.S. letter sized paper and well over 100 european A4 forms as well).

If someone can write a little to convert gLabels metrics to these OOo Templates then we can instantly expand both. (I'll probably still use gLabels for little things, and my father will continue to use it, but OOo is going to have a much broader audience for which another, extremely common, office productivity task will JUST WORK.

I hope that the next release of OOo will include this or include a mechanism for optionally fetching and installing this and other third party plugins and packages. (Perhaps a "wizard" that could link to an OOo maintained repository and be configured to your OS/distribution's native package manager file-type and commands --- including the ability to call sudo; so I'd bring up a dialog box in OOo which would query the OOo repository (over HTTP/SOAP/XML-RPC or whatever), then I'd click on the plug-in (such as this Template collection), and OOo would see that I'm on Debian and not running as root so it would check that the package is new, fetch the .deb and call: sudo dpkg --install ... and then reload it's "installed plug-ins" module(s). (Think "Click-n-Run" for OOo without the subscription fees).

JimD

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