Starting, Stopping, and Connecting to OpenOffice with Python

Dec 25, 2008, 20:04 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Mitch Frazier)

"If you want to get started with pyuno be prepared for an often frustrating experience: the documentation is sketchy and often just plain hard to locate, and the version of Python that's embedded in OpenOffice has been stuck at version 2.3 for quite a while now.

"Pyuno is the Python layer that implements OpenOffice's UNO interface. UNO is an application programming language independent interface to OpenOffice. UNO is specified in IDL and often the only documentation for pyuno is the IDL documentation for UNO.

"The code presented here runs outside of OpenOffice and shows how to start, stop, and connect to OpenOffice in "headless" mode. Running OpenOffice in "headless" mode means that OpenOffice doesn't display a window it just waits for UNO operations (via a TCP/IP port). The code presented here was tested with version 2.5 of Python and version 2.4 of OpenOffice. I also tested it with version 3.0 of OpenOffice but it only runs if you use the version of Python that comes with OpenOffice."

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