Feature - Templates

Templates are very important for any office suite. Here are some ideas how to improve the current situation on OOo.

Site with OOo temapltes

Scenario: One place where users can easily find and contribute templates

It would be great to gather all existing templates at one place and create some useful web framework around it:

• templates can be sorted into groups
• screenshots and short descriptions
• users can comment the templates and vote
• it should be possible to hide poor templates (based on the voting results)
• users can download only a selected template or all temlates at once
• force contributors to define license, title, author, really use the template format, ...
• the structure is well defined, so such (even 3rd party) sites can be online searched by OOo itself
• also the meta information (license, vote results, ...) should be store a well defined way, so they can be used by the online search from OOo (to filter poor templates, ...)
• is any extra support for signed templates necessary?

See http://www.kde-files.org/ as an interesting example.

Why a new project?

1. The existing projects are nearly dead or they are not woldwide known, ...
2. They do not allow to import the templates easily into OOo

Already existing projects [FIXME]:

• http://documentation.openoffice.org/Samples_Templates/User/template/index.html - dead, unclear license, only few templates
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooextras - nearly dead, LGPL, about 200 templates
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooolabels - new project by Russel (woldlabel.com), GPL, planed more than 500

templates mostly labels. He has some more plans.

• http://www.kde-files.org/ - one year old project, free, about 50 templates for OOo, 10 new in 2006
• http://ftp.fsf.hu/OpenOffice.org_hu/devel/Premium_source_splitted/ - the new OOo premium project by Kami, license

is controversal, it include many free templates from the other projects

• Caolan has a nice selection of tempaltes for Fedora

Better Open Template Dialog

Scenario: Creating a document should start with selecting a picture of the type of document you are going to write

We have a create from template wizard for impress, this is a suitable route for creating a word processor document as well. The existing impress dialog is a bit klunky and doesn't by default contain many examples for openoffice.org. The Apple iWork suite has nice templates and a nice selector widget. So we need a better template dialog like the iWork one, and ideally with the ability to browse an online set of quality controlled templates. documentation.openoffice.org contains a starting position, but some selection of best of breed needs to be done as well as seperation by language and theme, cleanup in terms of setting titles and licences and generation of previews. AppleTemplateDialog.png

It could include a button "search for more on the web" that will allow to take templates from external sites, see above.

Better Edit/Save Template dialogs

Scenario: User wants to modify an existing template or create a new one

The current dialogs File/New/Templates and Documents and File/Templates are a bit confusing. The main problems are already described at http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=20676

Categories

Scenario: A vendor wants to distribute a couple of temlates nicely sorted that can be added to OOo easily

OOo should support hierarchical categories with more than one level. The default hierachy should be defined by upstream. The categories should be extensible by 3rd party packages. Such extra categories could have localized names.

One solution would be to use the .directory desktop entry defined by [1]

OOo is quite XML based. I wonder if there exist any similar standardized solution based on xml.

Localization of templates

Scenario 1.: A template includes many graphics and only few localized strings

Scenario 2.: A vendor wants to localize tempaltes using .po files

The following features would help:

1. Allow to install language independent templates.
2. Allow to auto-translate the XML for their templates on load. This is used in MS Office and it could save a lot of space. Any better approach is welcome. There must stay the possibility to keep lang dependant layout. For example, various countries use different layout for letters. We should also pay attention to RTL vs. LTR.
3. Create easy tool that allow to update localizations using .po files.

TODO: Investigate how it is done in MS Office

Hmm, I am somewhat unable to find anything useful about localizing templates online in MS Office. A short note about something simmilar can be found at [2], see the section "Localizing Document Text".

It seems that MS Office includes some few general templates by default. Many others can be download from a localized site. If you repace "en-gb" with "de-de" in the URL, you get the german localization. It seems that there are extra templates for each localization. They are NOT multilingual and are NOT localized on load.

It is pity. IMHO, the multilingual templates would be good only for distributors that would like to distribute the templates on CD/DVD (disk space). It will not be so great for web access. If all the localized strings are in one file, the download would be greather. If the localized strings are in extra files, it would need to define dependencies between the files, ... and it would make the manipulation with templates more complicated.

On the other hand, We could add the support for templates with localizations in the external file. The tempalate with the single localization can be done on load or already on download ;-)

In each case, we should create tools that would extract/merge the strings, so they can be localized using .po files.