EXT: General Office Displayer¶

What does it do?¶

This extension provides import functionality for Microsoft Office 2003 Word and Excel documents (XML file type) as well as for Open Office Writer and Spreadsheet files. The contents of these files will be displayed in the layout of your website. They are even editable through the Rich Text Editor.

Where was it created?¶

This extension was kickstarted by Kasper Skårhøj and Robert Lemke on a 38°C hot summer evening on floor 1 of the Eiffel Tower in Paris :sup:`1 <#sdfootnote1sym>`_ , France, refreshed by the gentle breeze of the wings of History. The further development took place in boring, climatized offices though.

More Features¶

A powerful set of basic functions is compiled into this release. However there are many ideas for the future of this extension, and you probably have some custom needs for implementing it into your website.The time spent so far on developing this plugin has not been sponsored nor payed by any client, it's just a gift to the TYPO3 community. If you need more than the basic functionality you might consider sponsoring new features by donating time or money.

Screenshots¶

There are two ways of uploading office files. The plugin-way displays the file directly on your webpage:

Actual output on your website:

Doing it the import-way lets you edit the file's content in the Rich Text Editor:

About Microsoft Office 2003 file formats¶

First of all, for those of you who are curious to see what MS Word 2003 looks like, here is a screenshot:

This screenshot shows the first part of the sample document found in the “Samples” folder of this extension (“The Paris Incident.xml” - there are also versions in .doc format and Open Office .sxw).

And for Excel here is another screenshot:

This is how the Excel sample document looks (“Expenses.xml” - there are also versions in “.xls” and Open Office .sxc formats)

((generated))¶

FAQ¶

Q: When I try to upload an office file an error message tells me that the file is too large. How come?

A: The maximum file size defined in this extension is 10 Megabytes. However the administrator of your Website might have chosen to restrict the file size – or you even exceeded the 10 MB allowed by the extension

Q: The document doesn't display exactly like it does in Word / Excel / OO Writer / OO Spreadsheet.

A: That's right. But it hopefully fits into the layout of your website. TYPO3 only uses the content and structure of document in order to display it. Only few parts of the layout will match the original.

unzip (Linux)¶

unzip (Windows)¶

WinRAR (Windows)¶

Working with custom styles¶

The default settings will handle most of the basic styles which are available in your office documents. Additionally you may use your own formats / styles and define how TYPO3 should render them. Imagine you have a custom style “MyPreformattedStyle”. Simply add the following TypoScript to your template:

plugin.tx_rlmpofficeimport.tagWraps.mypreformattedstyle = <pre> | </pre>

... and all your custom style occurences will render preformatted.

Note: You must not use spaces or special characters in your custom style names.

Reference¶

imageCObject_scaledImage {
   file.width = 100
   file.import.current = 1
   imageLinkWrap = 1
   imageLinkWrap {
      width = 800
      JSwindow = 1
      enable = 1
    }
   wrap = <div style="text-align:center; margin-bottom: 10px;"> | </div>
}

heading1 = <h1> | </h1>
heading2 = <h2> | </h2>
heading3 = <h3> | </h3>
heading4 = <h4> | </h4>
heading5 = <h5> | </h5>
paragraph = <p> | </p>
bold = <strong> | </strong>
italic = <em> | </em>
underlined = <u> | </u>
unorderedlist = <ul> | </ul>
listitem = <li> | </li>
superscript = <sup> | </sup>
subscript = <sub> | </sub>
preformatted = <pre> | </pre>
indented = <blockquote> | </blockquote>

myownpreformatted = <pre class=”someclass”> | </pre>

<span class=”smarttag-city”> | </span>

Cascading Stylesheets¶

The whole output will be wrapped into a DIV tag with class=“tx- rlmpofficeimport-pi1”. By that you should be able to take influence on the layout of most tags being used. Otherwise just use the tagWraps options explained above.

Testing file formats¶

For your convenience (and for the memory of our session at Tour Eiffel ...) we provide a document for each format you can use to test the plugin. You find them in the samples/ folder in the extension's directory.

FAQ¶

Q: Why don't you support Microsoft Word .doc files? A: Office 2003 provides XML output – like Open Office does just for longer time. XML is much easier to parse than a proprietary format like the .doc files. However, if there is a real need for supporting .doc files even that might be implemented some day, ideas for some basic import features already exist.

Q: Why do you support Microsoft Office 2003 files at all? It's not Open Source, so ...? A: It's a wide-spread format and many customers are using it of course.

Q: Microsoft Office 2003 is not released yet (August 2003), can you send me a copy of the beta? A: No, sorry.

Q: I didn't find the Open Office Spreadsheet support you were talking about. Where is it? A: Well, I just didn't have the time to implement it yet. Just wait some more.

Q: Could you please implement XXX? I really need that feature! A: Yes, of course. You might consider sponsoring new features or wait until maybe your feature will be implemented some day.

Q: What do you plan for the future of this extension? A: You might want to look at our ToDo list. Just see the TODO.txt file in the extension's doc folder. It contains our notes about developing this extension.

Q: I use this extension on a windows driven surver / with the quickstarter package. If I try to upload an Open Office document nothing happens, why? A: Open Office documents consist of many files zipped into a single file. In order to unzip these, a program called “unzip” is needed. Support for windows binaries of such an unzipping program is still untested. On Linux platforms such a binary might easily be installed (see the section above for more information about unzip).