Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

I use the LiClipse software development environment (IDE) for most of my software development. It is a distribution of the Eclipse Project IDE, with PyDev, and its own Java runtime environment (JRE), and some extras. I like it because I can, by installing more components, work with more software languages. Most of the time, one can update the various components of an Eclipse IDE using the internal “Check for Updates” function. However, my installation had reached the point where updating the components required upgrading the JRE. The documentation for the latter upgrade was inadequate. Here is what I figured out. It worked for me. I hope these instructions are helpful for others.

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Well, that was a fright. I was editing a large report with the LibreOffice word processor. I had a table of results. It consisted of a placeholder table — a header and a couple of rows — with Table Styles applied to get the rows formatted right. I pasted in dozens of rows of content from a spreadsheet. I saved the file for the night. The next morning, I opened the document, and to my horror, found that text values in many of the columns had been turned to “0”. This is LibreOffice bug 131025. And here is how I recovered from the error, and got my table contents back. I hopes it helps others who encounter this bug.

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The .ODT word processor documents produced by LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are in fact ZIP archives consisting of XML files, other files, and directories. It is actually straightforward to crack open the archive and get at the files and directories within. To edit the XML files, or just to explore them, XSL Transformations (XSLT) are a useful tool. This is a look at how to use XSLT and the xsltproc tool on XML files extracted from .ODT documents.

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The .ODT word processor documents produced by LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are in fact ZIP archives consisting of XML files, other files, and directories. It is actually straightforward to crack open the archive and get at the files and directories within. This can be helpful for fixing bugs, or just for exploring. I recently had cause to do just that. Here is how to open up .ODT documents, and then turn those files and directories back into a document file.

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