Here's what I'm trying to do now: get Ruport to have report output as OpenOffice Writer documents with OpenOffice for Ruby. Problem is the license, that is GPL, and here's the answer from author:

Sender: James Britt
Date: 8.7.2006 23:19
Subject: Re: OpenOffice for Ruby?

Xet7 wrote:
> Hi,
> are you still developing OpenOffice for Ruby?
> http://rubyforge.org/projects/ooo4r/

No. I've pretty much pushed that aside. I haven't had the time to really look after it, and with the release of OOo 2, the file formats are now different.

> Are there any plans to continue development, or have you moved to other
> projects?

The last time someone inquired about OOo4R, they wanted to know if a gem version was available. I did some work to do that, but I don't think I ever publicly released it. In the meantime I've been too busy with work (Ruby work!) and don't have the same need for an OOo tool.

> How can this code be used in commercial projects? Because it is
> GPL, does it mean that applications that uses it, must be GPL too?

If you use GPL'ed code, then the results must be GPL as well. My code was based on Daniel Carrera's OOoExtract lib, which was under the GPL. So I don't know if I have much choice in changing the license.

> How much features it has, can I make with it a Writer document that
> includes graphs? Or should I look at other packages for OpenOffice support?

I started off with Daniel's code, which allowed for easy searching and data extraction for OOo docs. I wanted a way to create Writer documents from scratch, and started on OOo4R. I had hopes that it would lead to a pure-Ruby tool for the creation and manipulation of OOo files, including Writer, Presenter, and whatever the spreadsheet thing is called.

This turned out to be a massive task. The XML specs for OOo documents are amazingly complex. So I lowered my sites to being able to at least create or edit Writer docs. I then got stuck on some zlib bugs that kept corrupting my files.

As time went on my interest faded. I had hoped that making the code a RubyForge project would attract other developer who might want to help push things along, but that never happened. And now, with OOo2, the XML formats have changed, so my code is outdated.

There are some useful features in the code, but it is not strikingly robust. I had trouble understanding some REXML behavior, so adding or manipulating arbitrary elements in a document was buggy. The released code includes some tests and samples, so that should give you a general idea of what it does. But there is nothing there for graphics or anything fancy; I never got around to understanding that markup.

I saw your other E-mail, with the irc log. My suggestion is to take the OOo4R code and steal whatever ideas you think are useful, and write your own version that targets the current OOo document XML.

If you really prefer to make a go of things with the existing code, let me know and I'll see if I can reach Daniel and get permission to change my license.

Thanks, and I hope you can get some use from OOo4R.

James Britt