We’ve already seen in the previous two articles that there seems to be a rather big ‘disconnect’ between the offline and the online publishing world. While we’ve seen that it’s easier to embed media through an online publishing tool (WordPress), it’s easier to properly format and layout articles through the offline publishing tool (Openoffice). Both are very good software products in my opinion and they’re both free of charge and opensource.

Opensource tools

So is the opensource nature of the above tools a reason for the before mentioned ‘disconnect’? Honestly, I don’t believe so. There are clear signs in both tools that the blending of online and offline has begun and I believe it will only be a matter of time that Openoffice will support embedding online media into it’s documents in a proper and intuitive way. The beginning appears to be there, just at this point I’d say that it’s still somewhat poorly implemented. So what about commercial tools? I unfortunately could not tell you as I do not use any commercial tools for my publishing efforts. I’d like to hear feedback on whether it’s possible for example to include online media into Microsoft Office documents and publish this to a Microsoft webserver while keeping the links intact.

More Research

In this article I would like to investigate some more interesting aspects for which I would typically use a word processor rather than a webpage or a javascript editor.

Tabular data

Tables have for a long time been the bane of existence of both web designers and programmers. Below I have made a simple table with a blue heading border:

It is very trivial to insert such tabular data in Openoffice as it should. When making the above table in raw HTML it gets a lot more difficult when we use the simple TABLE tags in HTML and it doesn’t give us nearly as much flexibility. When we try to do the above using CSS it quickly becomes insanely difficult to do but we do get back more styling flexibility. Below I will try to reproduce the above table using the WordPress editor.

[[Update: Commenting on the result as seen in WordPress. While the outline of the above table does indeed appear blue in the WordPress editor, it does not show a blue border in the article view. Additionally, the table above does not quite fit in the contents panel and overflows over the right column.]]

Fonts

In the past I’ve also found that using fonts in a webpage can also cause a lot of problems. Some fonts can be sent along with a page. Some fonts are assume to be present on a browser’s platform but aren’t. Sometimes finding the correct size of the fonts to make everything fit properly on a page is a difficult thing to do.

This paragraph was written in an 18 pixel FreeSerif font while the font used in the paragraphs before was written in a 12 pixel Times New Roman font. I have inserted a page break just before this paragraph to make a clear distinction

So I’m real interested to see how the page break will show up in WordPress but even more so how the font will come out.

[[Update: Commenting on the result as seen in WordPress. As we can see, clearly there's a different font used in the above paragraph. It does look proportionally bigger than the normal fonts]]

Text placement

Making text right aligned in Openoffice is an easy thing to do.

While it’s very easy to align text to the right with CSS I’m not sure if the

Openoffice publishing plugin will translate right alignment to CSS in wordpress.

The above paragraph was made in the right alignment mode. If you’re reading this article on the web and you don’t see the previous paragraph being right-aligned, you will know that yet another point was scored! I’m holding my breath to see the results, but not much longer.

I have to admit, I would be very pleasantly surprised if it would work properly, so I will publish this article from Openoffice now and continue writing if from WordPress.

[[Update: Commenting on the result as seen in WordPress. I'm getting more impressed by the translations done by Openoffice/Wordpress. Perhaps the end result is not perfect yet but at the very least a very good effort was made here.]]

Getting WordPress articles back in Openoffice

Another thing I had worried a bit about earlier was:

• What if I start writing an article in Openoffice and keep the OO document on my local disk while later I make changes to the published article in WordPress?

It would seem that there is actually a button in Openoffice by virtue of the publishing extension to ‘Open a weblog entry’. I am most curious how this works and will try this in the next part of this series to check if some of the WordPress changes I’ve made will be correctly fed back into Openoffice.

I tested the above as well but the results were too horrible to publish. the right alignment disappeared, white space disappeared, the correct fontsize disappeared etc.