h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi BB,

I am happy to report that loading gd400 into my WinXP (home) machine and using it with OO2.0.2 (OOB680_m5 Build-1) went without a hitch

Now I'll go and have a play

If you have any Windoze-specific bug testing, let me know

Cheers
six7s

gd4oo... not gd400






Reading the .xsl files is v interesting! You have anticipated/accommodated a huge range of possibilities - even h2-skin specific URLs

I have yet to write anything in xsl... but it looks quite straightforward... maybe that will be my next 'project'???

On 'this' A-page, you say
"At the moment, the method described in the instructions at the beginning is probably best, until the copy GuideML to clipboard function has been implemented. Until then, you can attempt to automate the procedure by using a scripting language."

This too is something I'd like to try my hand at and I'm wondering if you have any tips

Instead of Notepad, I use SciTE (http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html) and, when writing html, hitting the F5 key loads the page into my browser of choice - a feature I like a lot

Is this the sort of procedure that could be automated in OpenOffice "by using a scripting language." ???

Thank you for helping. I'm glad I finally have someone testing this!

OpenOffice uses a dialect of BASIC for macros and programmability. I have a feeling that it won't be possible to extract the contents of the GuideML file. But I could try to make it execute the XSL transformation afresh and then add the output of that to the clipboard. It will take me some time to learn how to do this, though.

There is a program for the Windows command line that allows you to copy the contents of a file into the clipboard:
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/clipboard/

If you could exploit this in either a BAT file or a VBScript, then it might be possible to automate the copy to clipboard, and possibly even the launching of a browser. You could use VBScript, for example, to display a file-browsing dialog, the output of which could be used as the input to the clipboard program above.

Failing this, I may eventually consider writing a stand-alone program to solve the problem. This could be done in Java, but I don't know Java, so I'd probably do it in C++.

Another option might be to get OpenOffice to save the GuideML as text wrapped in HTML so that it opens in a web browser by default. The user could then easily copy it.

>> ... but I don't know Java, so I'd probably do it in C++

Apart from being an object-oriented language, Java is (syntactically) very very similar to C so, as you know C++, you'll probably find you already have a head-start on Java

If/when I get time, I'll aim to see how SciTE does it via the F5 key