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Word Processing Project

Project Owner: Mathias Bauer, Co-Lead: Frank Meies (Please use the provided mailing lists for discussion of this project and related issues.)

This is the home of the OpenOffice.org Word Processing Project. Its heart is the “Writer” application but it also comprises the OpenOffice.org Formula Editor “Math”, the integration of the linguistic components (spell checker, hyphenator, thesaurus) and some document filters for formats of other word processors. The linguistic components themselves are part of the lingucomponent project.

General information

Some general words about the Writer application can be found here. If you are looking for more detailed user information about Writer or Math, please try the following links:

If you have some questions that can't be answered by these documents please send them to our users@openoffice.org mailing list. If you prefer to discuss your questions in your own language please go to the home page of the OpenOffice.org Native Language project that matches your language. The home page of the selected language project should guide you to its “users” mailing list. Here are some hints how to work with mailing lists in the most efficient way.

If you want to discuss your ideas about the components of our project, please use the users@sw.openoffice.org or dev@sw.openoffice.org mailing lists. If you have an enhancement or a feature request or if you want to report a bug please use our Issue Tracker. We recommend to read something about issues before.

If you want to contribute something to the project you don't need to be a developer. Please read more about this here if you are interested.

Development

Past, Present and Future

With the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 we added a large number of new features and reworked a lot of the existing ones. A list of specifications that describe what we did can be found here. The stuff we are currently working on can be seen in the weekly “development at a glance” reports in our development group blog GullFOSS. More detailed comments on work in progress will appear in individual blog entries or in our wiki. There are some more things we already have scheduled for the forseeable future or what we are currently looking at but there are still a lot of things left.

Development Opportunities (ToDo list)

Unfortunately some great features, ideas or enhancements never got implemented because there are always other more important things to do. Please find a collection of such features and ideas here. They are great opportunities for interested developers as the list mostly contains features that have been demanded for by the OpenOffice.org community. So providing them surely would be appreciated by the users. Of course interested developers are also invited to present their own ideas they would like to implement for the Writer project. Please get in touch with us on dev@sw.openoffice.org or write a personal mail to one of the project leads.

Hall Of Fame

We have received patch contributions from other developers and some really nice features as well. Credit where credit is due as they say.

  • Patch Contributors
    There are some very valuable patches being submitted by Open Office contributors. Here is a list of contributions and who sent them.

  • Open Source Spellchecker
    When OpenOffice.org was made an Open Source project by releasing the former StarOffice code base we still had a proprietary spell checker that still could be used in StarOffice, but we didn't have linguistic tools usable in Open Source. So we where very pleased that Kevin B. Hendricks implemented them using the well known Open Source project myspell and so added a great component to OpenOffice.org. Later on Laszlo Nemeth extended myspell to hunspell and reworked the OpenOffice.org integration of it.

  • WordPerfect import filter
    William Lachance, the author of the libwpd library, created an awesome filter for OpenOffice.org based on this library.

  • Support for Smart Tags in Writer
    Jakob Lechner designed and implemented a UNO interface for the interaction between Writer and external Smart Tag libraries. Thanks also to his employer Fabalabs who sponsored this implementation by allowing Jakob to work on it during his company working time.