[ale] OOops! OpenOffice munges my HTML

John Mills johnmills at speakeasy.net
Sat Mar 29 21:35:06 EST 2003


ALErs -

As an OpenOffice-1.0.2 beginner, I decided to try it on a simple bit of 
maintenance on a web pabe I maintain. All went fine until I tried to view 
the new file with my browser.

@#$%&!!

The page was broken near the top, specifically a lead paragraph and a 
table following it were now stirred together in an ugly way. Not 
surprisingly, OO had put some overhead material of its own up front, had 
parsed and reformatted the file (all tags now UPPER CASE), and trashed the 
page layout by mashing the aforementioned table. I had previously gone 
through and fixed the hyperlinks by hand, as those looked suspect to me 
too.

What has been other folks experience using OpenOffice on HTML? Does it do
a good (or at least non-destructive) job on files it starts afresh? Could
this mean that my old file was ill formed? I haven't really looked at the
new or old parsing, but this file has been chewed on for quite a while and
may have been mis-blocked in a way browsers didn't see, but OO did and
tried to fix.

I usually just chop away on HTML with 'emacs', but have been keeping my 
eyes open for a more-or-less WYSIWYG tool for some beginners to use in 
M$Win. OO has a Windows incarnation so I could have suggested it to them.

Second, any observed differences between OpenOffice-1.0.2 (current
download) and StarOffice 6.0 (current commercial product) for this type of
work?

Lastly, I downloaded the binary installation package for OO-1.0.2 and
fired off the 'install' script. Have people found it worthwhile to build
OO from source, in terms of smoothness or robustness in Linux (RH-7.3 in
my case)? It has been my anecdotal observation that packages I build from
source in my own system seem to start better and cause me fewer problems
than downloaded binaries built for more general setups. (I know - this may
be a case of distorted judgement rather than actual fact.)

Thanks for any comments.

 John Mills
 john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale





More information about the Ale mailing list