I have read a lot of threads about the subject of pdf writers and haven't found an answer to my problem.
I am a volunteer teacher at the local computer club. I am showing the students how to do mail merge in Open Office. I can get letters and envelopes done with mail merge, but I cannot show the students what these documents will look like when printed.
I am using the clubs computers, with a projector on a large screen. Each student has his/her individual computer to follow along. All the computers belong to the club. They do not have a printer attached, nor do they have Cute PDF Writer installed.
I'm looking for a portable solution, so that I do not have to install Cute for the class then uninstall when finished.
Open Office will export their files to pdf, but it will NOT correctly export the mail merge documents.
Any ideas?
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it has been discussed many times here, there is simply no real universal solution to this.
The office has its own pdf writer if this one is not ok, then there is not much what can be done. Any such program will be a virtual printer, this needs to be installed and drivers need to be installed, so it can not be made portable.
There are some programs in the net, txt2pdf or word2pdf etc, but non will work 100% for all tasks.
Those programs usually work so, that you have to start it, then go and import the file you want convert and the program will try to produce pdf of it. The quality depends on the complexity of the original document.
one of the tools I use is however payware:
http://www.7-pdf.de/
you can find there pdf converter in paf format:
http://www.7-pdf.de/7-pdf-maker/#c1409
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Have you tried LibreOffice? It would likely be a better option as it is a much newer version of OpenOffice.org since development and patches on stable releases of OpenOffice.org was halted some time ago.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It sure looks like OpenOffice almost to a T. Everything I see and read about so far in the little time I spent, can't find any tutorials and stuff I did find the lead you to OOo sites and documentation. Does this mean OOo is pretty much done ? I didn't find the last time OOo was updated either, closest I came (I think) was some where near February-April 2011. Is the same team doing Libre Office or OOo handed over everything to someone ?
Most of the OpenOffice.org team outside of Oracle abandoned the project and founded The Document Foundation to be a new non-profit in charge of LibreOffice. Since then they've got hundreds of contributors and corporate backers. Oracle then tried to salvage the remains of OpenOffice.org and gave it to the Apache project. There it is in the early stages of reforming with only a single beta release. Other than that, OpenOffice.org has been dark for over a year. Most folks I know have switched to LibreOffice. And the licensing of LibreOffice will prohibit the OpenOffice.org from using any of LO's code, meaning OO.o is stuck developing solo.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
"And the licensing of LibreOffice will prohibit the OpenOffice.org from using any of LO's code..."
So, basically LO is saying "Fork you!" [to Oracle primarily I would guess and justifiably so] (which would seem to contradict the nature of "open source" as well as the very name of LibreOffice). Oh, well.
OpenOffice.org was always under a special license with all contributors signing a joint copyright agreement with Sun (and thus Oracle) saying they could make a commercial version of it that was closed source. LibreOffice split off and went LGPL which prevents folks from taking all the contributors hard work and packaging it into a closed product unless they only use it as calling libraries. OpenOffice.org is now under Apache and the Apache license allows closed source combinations (Oracle was able to re-license it under Apache due to the copyright assignment previously mentioned). Because of the way the licenses work, LibreOffice can still take anything under an Apache license and work it directly in, but the reverse doesn't apply. LibreOffice chose the licensing to ensure that anyone who benefits has to contribute back. Hmmm... I think it is dual licensed under the MPL, so that may not be quite right, actually.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
That originated with StarOffice I would guess?