OpenOffice Toolkit

This is an ingredient intended for use with EPrints 3.4+. It is designed to allow EPrints to connect to OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) to support the generation of coverhseets for PDF documents and to allow Thumbnails to be generated from Microsoft Office documents. It allows a headless version of OpenOffice/LibreOffice to be controlled either via a Systemd module to manage it from the command line or from controls within EPrints admin web interface.

This ingredient is based on the original Coversheets Bazaar plugin. There are various improvements, in particular the ability to start and manage OpenOffice/LibreOffice through the operating system, which ensure greater reliability than through EPrints admin web interface.

Installation

1. Install a headless version of OpenOffice of LibreOffice using the operating system's package manager. E.g.

yum install libreoffice-base libreoffice-writer

apt install libreoffice-base libreoffice-writter

2. Install unoconv Python library. If you have are running a modern version of Linux this should be available via the package manager. E.g.

yum install unoconv

apt install unoconv

If it is not, then install as the root user using Python's pip installer. (You may need to use pip3 rather than pip).

pip install unoconv

If you have to install from pip you will need to update the unoconv invocation in cfg.d/openoffice.pl and possibly the python executable to make sure it uses Python v3.

3. As the eprints user, checkout this ingredient to EPrints' ingredients/ directory.

4. Add this ingredient to the inc file of the flavour used by your EPrints archive. E.g. EPRINTS\_PATH/flavours/pub\_lib/inc

5. If you want to maintain OpenOffice/LibreOffice using Systemd.

   a. As root, copy bin/epoffice.service to /lib/systemd/system/ and start and enable it.

   cp bin/epooffice.service /lib/systemd/system/
   systemctl enable --now epooffice
   

   b. As the eprints user, copy cfg.d/z_disable_openoffice_buttons.pl.disabled to your archive's cfg/cfg.d/ directory to remove the controls from the admin web interface or you are liable to end up running multiple instances of OpenOffice/LibreOffice, which would likely cause coversheeting to not behave as intended.

   cp cfg.d/z_disable_openoffice_buttons.pl.disabled ../../archives/ARCHIVE\_ID/cfg/cfg.d/z_disable_openoffice_buttons.pl

6. Run epadmin test to confirm there are no problems with EPrints' overall configuration.

7. Reload the webserver. E.g. apachectl graceful

Usage

TO BE WRITTEN

Further Information

See https://wiki.eprints.org/w/Openoffice_Ingredient