Sozi

A little over a year ago, I met Prezi, for the first time. For those not familiar with it, Prezi is an online tool for creating non-linear presentations. Although, the term non-linear doesn't accurately describe what Prezi has to offer, Prezi is a very good tool to produce these Flash-based presentations.

Time passed, and I didn't really use Prezi for more than two or three presentations. Probably this is because we still have the "Slides" culture, but every now and then, when I need to initiate a new presentation or renew an existing one, Prezi comes back to the front of my head. Every time Prezi pops up in front of me, I try to find some desktop tool to produce similar results, preferably Open Source (Well, I'm a Linux-only user now).

Well, today I came across this Inkscape extension called "Sozi". Sozi is an extension for Inkscape that produces animated svg's with resulting Posters or "canvas" similar to those produced by Prezi. It is pretty simple, and straight forward once you get grip of the basic concepts. A nice introductory tutorial can be found here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOuf7w_Qesk].

Sozi official website [http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/doku.php]

Installation Instructions [http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:install]

LibreOffice - IBM Symphone: Take Two!

In a previous post, I chose to use IBM Symphony as my office package, basically because it seemed to offer more features than LibreOffice. Today, I removed IBM Symphony after finding, statistically, that I use LibreOffice more often. It's been almost a month since I last open an application of the Symphony package. I'm not claiming that the LibreOffice is better, not in this stage, anyway, but I've came to the conclusion that anything in symphony is there somewhere in LibreOffice. To be frank, I'm starting to think that the Symphony implements pieces of the OpenOffice.org's code, if not the whole deal! (No, I'm not saying that I dived in the code and found anything, I'm just under such impression, given what I see on the surface).

So, today I removed the symphony, and happily got rid of the system tray icon for it.

MDI - Microsoft Document Imaging Format

If you have used the Microsoft Document Imaging Format (MDI), like me, when it was introduced in Office 2003, then you must have been looking around for solutions to enable you to open the .mdi files today.

I have more than few documents on my hard drive that I produced in MDI format, which was promoted to be the new PDF format from Microsoft. It was portable, and it was in that time when you needed third party software to produce PDF's from Microsoft Office documents, which gave it all the importance. The ability to produce PDF-like documents with ease and directly from within the Microsoft Office was neat.

But .. Just as everything that is Microsoft, they take decisions for you, and put them to execution, leaving you struggling behind, trying to solve issues you have no hand in, except for adopting the Microsoft way, off-course. 

I'm not going to be talking about opening .mdi files in other operating systems than Microsoft's, neither about opening them without an installation of Microsoft Office, on the contrary, I will assume a loyal Microsoft customer, who upgrades his Office suite regularly, and now has Microsoft Office 2010 installed on his W7-machine.

According to Microsoft's support website, mdi format is now obsolete. This does not only mean you can't produce mdi files anymore, but also you can't open them! Although, the format was originally Microsoft's way for PDF-like documents, Microsoft doesn't provide a stand-alone reader for the format, nor a converter to other formats. Those of us who have .mdi documents laying around, have to follow one of two solutions, according to this post by Microsoft. Either download and install a free version of the SharedPoint Designer 2007, which is a 300MB download, for it has an mdi viewer, or use the Office 2007 installation medium (I don't remember where mine is now, but probably wrecked and thrown away) to install the optional Microsoft Office Document Imaging component.

This is B.S., if you ask me. Any decent programmer working in a garage, let alone a huge company such as Microsoft, knows well that in such situation, the least one can do is to provide a stand-alone reader/conversion tool to your obsolete formats.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this product, MDI2PDF, which is supposed to be able to convert MDI files to the more solid and usable PDF format. In its free edition, the only thing I could do, besides viewing the mdi files and answering annoying messages, is to convert the first page of each mdi to a bmp or jpeg file. If your mdi's are more-than-one-page, then you have to go with the Microsoft Solution.

Enabling RTL in Symphony and Libre Office

This one took awhile to figure out, and it was easy. I write in Arabic, my native language. Arabic is an RTL (Right-To-Left) language, which requires RTL support in my word processor.

By default, word processors do not show support for RTL directly, as their default language/languages are mostly LTR ones (English and Latin languages).

I use Ubuntu now, with both Libre Office and Symphony as my Office Packages (still trying to chose one of them permanently, and wishing it would Libre Office, since it is an Open Source Project). Again, by default, both Symphony and Libre Office Writer do not show support for RTL by default, and I had to look around a little bit to know that they include this in the CTL (Complex Text Layout) support.

Moving to Ubuntu Linux - pt.02

Being a technical editor, by day, means I do intensive document editing. I like to believe that I use the MS-Word features to the max. Even the buggy ones, like the Master Document. 

Sparing so much details, and although I tend to like the open source solutions, I couldn't find any of the available packages fully satisfying my editing needs. The closest was IBM's Lotus Symphony. It's a shame that there's not open source solution with such capabilities, but Lotus Symphony is freeware, anyway.

IBM doesn't provide a 64bit package for Symphony, but googling around brought up links to 64bit deb packaged by Dylan, in OMGUbuntu.

Symphony works just fine. It is true that it lacks some of the features, but having a macro mode helps. Personally, I would rate the experience a good 80% satisfaction for the word processor.