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.
You probably don’t need these anymore! Someone sent me this notice in an e-mail
Just an FYI. I have found that in OpenOffice 3.2 running on Windows there is an openoffice icon in the system tray that when right clicked allows you to open any individual application directly. On a Mac simply keeping the openoffice icon in the dock and then right clicking it gives you the same capability.
These launchers are now unsupported! I’ll leave them here in case you need them or find them useful. Based on e-mails I get I would guess that they do not work for about 5% of people who download them. I’m sorry I can’t debug or give support, but I don’t use a Mac anymore. Of course, if someone were to give me a new Mac, I’d be happy to solve whatever problem they were having.
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/bin
There 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.bin
If 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.
