Install Al-Quran extension in openoffice

This was done in Fedora 13 with openoffice 3.2.0. Please follow below steps to install it:

1. Download the installation files

$ wget http://qioo.googlecode.com/files/QiOO-0.4b.zip

2. Extract it to somewhere

$ unzip QiOO-0.4b.zip
$ ls QiOO-0.4b
CHANGELOG  QiOO-0.4b.oxt  README.txt  ScheherazadeRegOT.ttf

3. Copy ScheherazadeRegOT.ttf to /usr/share/fonts

$ sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/ScheherazadeRegOT; sudo cp -apv QiOO-0.4b/ScheherazadeRegOT.ttf /usr/share/fonts/ScheherazadeRegOT

4. Install the extension by opening openoffice writer and go to Tools > Extension Manager > Add, and search for the QiOO-0.4b.oxt plugin.

5. Activate CTL by going to Tools > Option > Language Settings > Languages > Enable For CTL(Complex Text Layout)

6. If all went well, you can see AlQuran menu in your openoffice writer's menubar like below.


That's all.

Turn off automatic first capital letter in openoffice

By default, openoffice will automatically turn the first letter to capital in a sentence. This feature is very useful but sometimes you do not want your first letter in your sentence to be capital. There is a setting that you have to turn off to make this happen. This steps have been tested on openoffice 3.

1. go to Tools -> AutoCorrect
2. go to Options tab
3. Uncheck Capitalize first letter of every sentence under [T] which means disable capitalize first letter of every sentence when typing
4. Click on OK
   

Done :)

Installing microsoft truetype font on ubuntu

The reason we need this microsoft truetype fonts is that we want the documents created in microsoft office to be nicely opened in openoffice. To install microsoft trutype fonts:

1. Run the command below to install msttcorefonts. You can also use synaptics package manager to install if you are not familiar with terminal

$ sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

2. To immediately use the new font, run the command below to rebuild back font information cache files

$ sudo fc-cache -fv

3. Your new fonts are ready to be used. Fonts that are already installed are:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

To add another font besides listed above, just copy the fonts files, and put it inside ~/.fonts/. You can find the fonts files from sourceforge

Openoffice 3.0

Openoffice 3.0 is now available for download.
From the openoffice.org website:

"Apologies - our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented
demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are
trying to come up with a solution.

Thank you for your patience."

That means so many people in the world is using openoffice that openoffice.org have to increase their servers capacity ;)

Boosting openoffice's performance

Some of you people out there that just started using OpenOffice(OO) complaints that this office suite is a bit slow and not suitable for old and low end computers. Here are a few tips on boosting your OO performance.

1. Disable java environment
• Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> java
  
• Uncheck 'Use a java runtime environment'
2. Add memory capacity of OO
• Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Memory
• Under 'Graphics Cache', increase the 'Use for OpenOffice.org' memory. Increase accordingly depending on your system physical memory. For example, you can put it to 128 MB if your physical memory is 512MB
• Increase also the 'Memory for object' value
• For easier start of OO application, check the 'enable systray Quickstarter'. It will put one shortcut for all OO application at the right hand corner of your desktop
  

MAMPU of Malaysia migrates to openoffice

MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, will start adopting the Open Document Format (ODF) starting from 1st April 2008. They are also planning to use uninstall Microsoft Office suite from their computers by the end of this year. The main objective is to reduce cost in obtaining the proprietary software such as Microsoft Office.
The migration process will be assisted by Malaysian Government Open Source Competency Centre(OSCC) in the form of training all the staffs and new users of OpenOffice to smoothen the migration. This is a great news for the open source community. For further details, refer here