Clker.com - weblog

Finally, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s 4:21 AM and I’m very happy to reach this stage with the openoffice addon.

You can download it Openoffice.org addon for clker.com integration . Installation is very easy, from the tools menu in openoffice, select Extension Manager. Click add, and point to the file. You will need to restart openoffice for it to work.

This extension will show you the contents of your basket stored on clker, and will allow you to place any clipart image in the clipboard, then you can paste it in the correct place in your document.

Still there are some minor issues:

1. The addon parent is currently null, so an extra window will appear in the task bar
2. The way we place the picture in the clipboard is by loading it in draw, select all and copy then closing draw. There are better ways for doing this. You will notice that the screen will flicker especially if your using the ODG or the SVG formats since draw takes some time to render the vectors.

In case you wanted to play with the source, the addon source is here.

Technorati Tags: addon, uno, openoffice, gallery, clipart, online, clker

I’ve been working since yesterday on an addon to openoffice.org , which will directly insert images from clker.com . The way it works is by searching for the images you want, adding them to my basket , then going to openoffice.org and hitting the addon button.

Just from few minutes I got the basic idea to work, and the addon is accessing the contents of the basket. I would now give the openoffice.org team a super thumbs up on the UNO implementation and the way it is designed - also to the netbeans team.

I’ve been out all day today, eating almost at every stop turkey, stuffing plus driving for more than three hours from Germantown to Ocean City - yet I’m so excited about this addon and still working on it. I’ll see how much longer I will last before collapsing :)…..

Watch the website after thanksgiving for the release of the addon - I’ll do my best to get it out by Monday if not before.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, open, office, org, addon, clipart, clker, turkey, thanksgiving, stuffing, ocean city, germantown

More cleanup since yesterday. I found that some SVGs have bogus linked images, which makes inkscape show a big red cross saying “linked image not found”. I added a pre-filtering stage before the thumbnails are created in which the SVG is cleaned up. In that process, bogus image insertions are deleted, and non-ASCII characters are replaced by spaces. This is another issue that appeared with non us-english files. I found that there are characters over 127, but the XML file is assumed to be ascii, which again makes inkscape and other programs I’m using throw errors.

I ran the thumbnail regeneration script and lots of images are getting cleaned up. There are still some problems with ODG export, and little by little I’ll get all of the problems taken care of.

Technorati Tags: inkscape, odg, clipart, openoffice, openoffice.org, openclipart, openclipart.org, svg, png, export, cleanup, clean, up