Re: [gentoo-desktop] Adding a text fiile printer (or any printer) in OpenOffice

[Daniel Gryniewicz]

On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 00:00 -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 22:11 -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> > I have some very old (Wordstar 3) documents which I'd like to print to a
> > plain text file with simple newlines, page headers and footers, etc, so
> > I need a generic printer with a "print to file" option.  There's no such
> > printer available on OpenOffice, so I tried to add one.
>
> Actually, it looks like if I set up a printer in cups, it shows up in
> OpenOffice, so that question is answered, but I still can't get a proper
> likeness of the document to file.
>
> The document was created in Wordstar 3 under CP/M in the 80s.  I managed
> to get it properly imported into Microsoft Word using a rather obscure
> input filter, and the resulting MS Word file was partially true to the
> original formatting.  I opened this file in OpenOffice and did a fair
> amount of work to bring the page and line formatting back to original.
> Wordstar did soft hyphens at line ends - which had gotten lost in
> conversion - and I had to replace these and a bunch of the indentation
> to restore the full justificiation of all paragraphs as the origignal
> had.
>
> The resulting document uses a Courier non-prop. font and I'd like to be
> able to print it to a text file _just as it looks_ and preserve all the
> indentation, centering and justification.  Seems like just about any
> format I save it to, however (HTML, RTF, text) loses these features and
> I'll have another job ahead of me re-formatting everything again in vim
> or some other text editor.  This can be done, but I'm wondering if
> there's any way to get text output from OpenOffice that's truer to the
> original appearance.

Is there some reason you can't save it as a text (or RTF, or
opendocument) file?  I've imported from obscure wordprocessors before,
and saved as normal files fine.

Daniel

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