Some time back, I started off a planet for NGOs at ngoplanet.org based on rawdog, not long after planetkde’s switch to rawdog. NGO Planet does rss, opml and blogs listing, just like planetkde, but takes a different route to do all that (and opinion is divided on whether that’s for better or for worse ).

Instead of using jriddel’s rss plugin that powers planetkde (unfortunately, I could not install libxml2 on my hosting provider, which is needed by the rss plugin), it dumps each form of output just by using a different template for each. So, with a minor tweak to rawdog code, rss is dumped using a rawdog template like this and an itemtemplate like this.

For the blog listing, it takes in an additional config parameter called feeditemtemplate that specifies the template for generating the list of feeds. The same infrastructure is thereby used to dump both the blog listing and the opml output, using separate set of templates for opml and bloglist. The complete set of code changes is in this github repo.

I do feel that hacking on the templates is an easier and more powerful way to extend rawdog (though I do realize that the creator of rawdog thinks otherwise). On the downside, this requires rawdog to be run multiple times, once for each type of output, unlike how it’s done with planetkde – that’s probably fixable, though.

PS: A secondary purpose for this post is also to shamelessly bump NGO Planet itself , so if you know of any blogs about NGOs anywhere in the world, please tell them about NGO Planet.

Last week saw the introduction of a brand new feature in KWord: crap drops. Er, I mean, drop caps. You can specify how many lines it should span, how many characters to drop, and even the extent of horizontal gap between the dropped chars and the rest of the paragraph (all only through the odf file, for now). But if if you ask me, I just like the plain old three-line single character drop char (thanks, Thomas, for the screenshot).

Compared to Word 2007 and OpenOffice 2.3, it works pretty much the same usual way in, er, usual circumstances. But in subnormal scenarios, like for example, when the paragraph doesn’t have as many lines as how many lines the drop cap spans, or in the case where the paragraph has a mix of quirkily extreme font sizes, all three word processors behave differently, and somehow, I can’t point to any of them and say that’s outright wrong. So, if you have any inputs on how KWord’s drop caps behaves or should behave in certain situations, please leave a comment or mail me.

Now for the how-stuff-works part. What I’ve done is, create a separate new line for the set of dropped characters (setNumColumns), and increase their font size on the layout by the number of vertical lines they should span (setAdditionalFormats). Then it’s only a matter of shifting out a few subsequent lines horizontally without changing their vertical positioning (setPosition) and reducing their width to accommodate the dropped characters abreast of these lines. That, in brief, is about it. Mostly.
Sample odts: dropCapsLines.odt, dropCapsLength.odt, dropCapsDistance.odt

We added a feature in KWord yesterday that lets you strike-out a text, like “wrong word” with any custom text, like “x” or “—x—” instead of the boring “wrong word” style (example odt). You can also use any custom text to fill the whitespace created by a tab (example odt). Rather advanced text editing, I’d say. And it turns out that it you can get it to create some rather funky patterns.

The one on the top is done with ‘o’s struck-out with with ‘O’s. And the next one has ‘/’s struck-out with ‘| – ‘. These strings can be specified in an ODT file and read in, but as yet there’s no interface in KWord to create such a document directly.

Now that we have this, if there’s any artist making ASCII art who wants an alpha channel in his “images”, KWord will be his tool of choice.