Friday, March 25, 2011

The so called Hidden Features of LibreOffice 3.3

There are quite a few non-noticeable features in LibreOffice 3.3.x. I thought of sharing a few here...

Batch conversion
Especially useful when you want to work with command line or invoke conversion from another program or convert set of files to a given format (batch process).

Equivalent commands: oocalc (and its set), localc (and its set), soffice.bin
Assuming the current working directory is the libreoffice installation directory

The following command would convert all the *.doc files to *.pdf files
./soffice.bin -convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export -outdir /home/user/output /inputfiles/*.doc

[PS: wildcards wouldn't work correctly on windows specify the file names (list) instead.]

Forcing input filter while opening via command line
Whenever we open a file using the command line, we wouldn't generally have a choice to select the input file type (e.g. xlsx MSO 2007 or xlsx MSO 2010 or anyother). We would be at the mercy of the program to auto detect correctly. Use the following option to force opening the file with a given filter.
./soffice.bin -infilter="Calc Office Open XML" file.xlsx

Combining the above two
oh well...I guess by now it should be easy ;)

References
./soffice.bin -help
List of output filters: http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/filters/filter/source/config/fragments/fcfg_writer.mk
List of input filters: Search with the above example filter or http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/search?q=PreferredFilter&project=filters

Watch out for more such features...