Writing Posts in OpenOffice

For one thing, this article is an experiment, to see how well the OpenOffice Web Layout works. I’ve used several different articles that were created in Microsoft Word and they worked perfectly in WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. The only thing I had to edit was getting the pictures installed in my image gallery.

Naturally, I had to get the images from the source cited in the articles and then, resize them in Gimp. They fit right into posts and pages in Gutenberg’s image block.

Now that I have my Linux machine back up and running, with my Brave browser, using an alternative keyboard and mouse plugged into USB ports, I’m creating this article in OpenOffice and I’ll post it to let you kow what’s going on.

I am very thankful to have had guests writing posts lately. I have been working on writing books that I can sell on the website. I’ve been doing some in depth research about the topics I’m writing about, which takes a lot of time, and hope to have the books available for sale on the website and Amazon and anywhere else I can sell them, some time this year.

I’ve been learning a lot by reading the guest articles. They are very well written stories, full of great content about working in your own home office.

I created a new directory in the posts directory of my local file system, ie., the file system on my computer. I downloaded a few pictures from my OneDrive account into a new directory in my posts directory.

Open each photo in GIMP. Once you open the first image in GIMP, you can use, file open, for any others and then, Image > Scale Image. Scale them down from 6000 to 1000 px wide. Click on the link twice, once to adjust the image ratio and the second time to lock the image ratio to the new size. Keep in mind that I have the settings on my computer set to open files with one click. No double clicking.

I have my picture quality set on 95%. Select , Scale. Then navigate to File > Export As and export it as a JPG. Change the name of the image by adding an underscore 2, like this _2, to the name of the picture. Then, when you exit from GIMP, it will ask you if you want to save or discard the changes. Select discard changes and you will have the original and the new scaled image saved in the directory for that post.

In order to create links in OpenOffice Writer, navigate to Insert > Hyperlink. Copy and paste your Link URL into the target space. Then, click on the Frame dropdown list and select _blank to tell your audience’s browser to open the link in a new window.

The links transfered to Gutenberg, but the pictures did not. That’s okay, because even though the pictures do transfer when I copy and paste them from email to Gutenberg on my Windows desktop, I still had to download the photos from the source and load them into the website photo gallery.

I did make some progress on getting the website to work on tablets and smartphones. It’s not perfect, but at least its working. I’m learning how to use WordPress, Gutenberg, and Kadence together with other free and open-source tools like GIMP and OpenOffice Writer to get into a high performance workflow, and showing you how to do the same thing in your own home office at the same time.