Operation Manual

By default, OpenOffice.org saves and loads files in a format known as the Open Document Format (ODF). This is a standards-
based, royalty-free file format supported by the majority of office suite packages—including newer versions of Microsoft Office.
When saving a file in OpenOffice.org, you can change the format using a drop-down menu in the Save As dialogue. Under File
Type, you can select a variety of formats, including several which are fully compatible with older versions of Microsoft Office.
When you’re sharing files created on the Pi in OpenOffice.org with users of older software, remember to change the format to
ensure that everyone can open the files. Alternatively, you could convince them to install OpenOffice.org themselves, which is
available free for Linux, Windows and OS X.
Image Editing with The Gimp
OpenOffice.org is a powerful piece of software, but one area where it lacks is in image editing. Although OpenOffice.org Draw
is a powerful tool for illustrative work, unfortunately, you can’t use it to touch up digital photographs. These are known as
bitmapped images, and are very different to the vector images Draw is designed to edit.
For image editing, one of the most powerful tools available for Linux is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, usually referred
to as The Gimp. The Gimp is one of the most popular projects in open source, because it offers powerful features for editing
bitmapped images with a user interface that is similar to the interface that’s used by the commercial Adobe Photoshop package
(see Figure 8-3).
Figure 8-3: The Gimp running on the Raspberry Pi