Greenstone Extensions

The Open Office extension provides a document conversion facility if Open Office or LibreOffice is already installed on the system. In order to use the Open Office extension,

• You will need Open Office or LibreOffice installed. You may need to create an environment variable called SOFFICE_HOME and set this to the full path of your OpenOffice or LibreOffice installation folder, if:
  • you're on Windows and have OpenOffice/LibreOffice installed in a location other than "C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3" or "C:\Program Files\LibreOffice" (where "Program Files (x86)" is another possibility in place of "Program Files"). In such a case, also ensure that your PATH environment variable contains the path to the "program" subfolder located in your SOFFICE_HOME path (the OpenOffice installation folder).
  • you're on Linux and have OpenOffice or LibreOffice installed in a location different from "/opt/openoffice.org3" or "/usr/lib/openoffice" (or "/usr/lib/libreoffice").
• Once you have Open Office set up, download the Greenstone extension for it, available in tar.gz and zip formats. The latest version is available from here and unzip into Greenstone 2's ext subfolder or Greenstone 3's gs2build\ext subfolder. (If you're using Greenstone 3.10 or earlier, download the tarball or zip file from here instead and unzip into Greenstone 3.10's gs2build\ext folder, and then also download the script background-launcher.vbs and put this into gs2build\bin\windows.)
  
• Before you can use this (or any other Greenstone extension), you will need to quit GLI and GS3-server if either are open and then you will need to relaunch GLI (or run Greenstone scripts) from a fresh command terminal, in order for the extension to become available in the Greenstone environment. (Once again, if you have openoffice or libreoffice installed outside the customary locations, then before doing so, make sure to have set up SOFFICE_HOME and updated the PATH environment variables.)
• With OpenOffice and the extension installed and the Greenstone environment set up for this, Greenstone's Word, PowerPoint and Excel Plugins will have a new option, "-openoffice_conversion", allowing conversion with Open Office instead of the existing converter. Switching on this new option means that more recent Office formats like docx can be included in Greenstone collections and processed by Greenstone.

• Don't use a snap or appimage version as these don't interface with Greenstone.

LibreOffice is available directly from their website at:

www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

These are the latest releases for most deb and rpm based linux distributions and for windows and macOS.

The packages are large, and in the case of deb packages are themselves a collection of deb packages.

Note that with these newer versions of the open office extension, you cannot already have an instance of OpenOffice running when using GLI, you will need to terminate any previously running instance. It is also unlikely that you can get a separate instance of OpenOffice running after quitting GLI. If you wish to do so, you will need to use Task Manager to terminate the open office process launched by the extension upon running GLI.