OpenOffice.org Aqua Rocks
I love the new OpenOffice.org Aqua. The two downsides for our family were: 1) No individual applications or launchers 2) No easy way to start it from the command line.
Today I decided I'd had enough and created some launchers both for the GUI and for the command line.
Individual Application Launchers for OpenOffice.org
Did you ever want each part of OpenOffice.org to have it's own icon on Mac OSX? With these launchers you can click on the icons to start the individual programs, or you can drag files onto them to open the files directly.
To install them, just unzip the file and place them in the same directory as the OpenOffice.org application. They will not work if they are somewhere else!
These launchers were created and tested only with OSX 10.4.11, OpenOffice.org 3.0 Aqua Beta. They were made with Sveinbjorn Thordarson's incredible Platypus program which lets you create applications from shell scripts.
OpenOffice.org Command Line Launchers for OSX
Although I will use the GUI launchers as well, they were more for my wife than for myself. After creating the GUI OO.o launchers, I spent a little time in self indulgence and created a command line launcher for my own use.
To install these launchers, untar them to a directory in your path, eg:
tar xzf OpenOffice.org_cmd_line.tgz -C /usr/local/binThere is actually only one file with several hard links to the same file. The appropriate part of OpenOffice.org will be launched depending on the name of the executable.
The included launchers are:
- oobase
- oocalc
- oodraw
- ooimpress
- oomath
- oooffice
- oowriter
The command line launchers assume that soffice.bin (the actual OpenOffice.org executable) is located at
/Applications/OpenOffice.org/OpenOffice.org.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice.binIf this is not the case, you will need to edit one of the launchers and change the ooCommand variable. Since the launchers are all hard linked, editing one of them will fix them all.
Running the command line launchers gives an error "XPath error : Invalid or inclomplete context", but I'm not sure why and they still seem to work, so I'm not going to spend time chasing it down. If someone knows how to fix it, let me know and I will fix the scripts.
License
These launchers are all licensed under the same terms as OpenOffice.org itself. The GUI launch scripts are based on scripts found withing the OpenOffice.org.app bundle, and the icons are taken from there as well.




