I'm an attorney who's using OpenOffice and Linux (SimplyMEPIS), and I need a bit of help. Running OOo 1.1.4 on SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1.

I'm trying to run a (mostly) paperless office. To that end, I need to track the documents I create with OOo, scan documents I receive from the other side, and keep everything to do with a single client well organized. Lately, I've taken to designing what could be best described as "virtual pleadings boards" for my cases. Essentially, it's a standard OOo Writer document that has a table describing all the documents from a case, the order and date upon which each was received/created, and a hyperlink (Insert -> Hyperlink) to the actual document on my computer.

This works well for my own created documents because I can open the pleadings board, click on a link for a document I'd like to view, and then it just opens in a new OOo Writer window. Exactly what I'm looking for. However, things get a little touchy with my scanned documents, which are all .pdf files.

When I click on a hyperlink I've created to a .pdf file, I get the following error message: "No corresponding external application could be found for the given file type. Please check the OpenOffice.org settings." The only thing I can think of for this would be in "Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> External Programs." There's no dialog there to define particular programs for particular file types, but there is a generic "File Manager" dialog. The help file for this is the very opposite of helpful, and I've tried linking to Konqueror and XFE but I still get the same error message when trying to open .pdf links.

Anyone ever encountered this problem, or have any possible solutions? It's much more convenient for me to be able to open, view, and manage all of my case documents from a central location.

I don't use Mepis, but...

In the control center, is there a "file association"?
Don't know if this is the problem(????).

In mine (Xandros), I have

control center
-> file manager
-> file association

If nobody helping on this forum, you could also try the Oo forum,

http://www.oooforum.org/ .

Sheng-Chieh

It's not a MEPIS problem, it's an OpenOffice problem. KDE properly loads .pdf files in Acrobat Reader when I launch them from Konqueror. When opened from links in OOo documents, however, OOo tries to open the file itself, which fails because it doesn't have read support for .pdf files. I need to figure out how to either tell OOo to use the KDE file associations to know what to open .pdf documents with, or to find a way to specify to OOo directly that it needs to launch Acrobat Reader.

I've already posted in the OOo forum. No replies as of yet, so I thought I'd post here as well.

I've figured out the problem. When I was making the hyperlinks, they were going through a few folders that had apostrophes in the names (e.g. "Jeff's Clients"). THAT is what was throwing OOo off. I redid my client files directory to remove all apostrophes from the folder names.

For anyone else who may be interested in doing something like this, in OOo 1.X you will need to define your file manager (Tools -> Options -> External Programs). For example, I use KDE/Konqueror. So, in the "file manager" line I input the command "/usr/bin/kfmclient openProfile filemanagement" without the quotes. Now, when I try to launch a file from a hyperlink that OOo doesn't know how to handle, it launches Konqueror. Since Konqueror has native read support for .pdf files it will automatically display the target file. I was originally looking to launch Acrobat, but this works. Since all I really wanted to do was just see the damn file, I don't really care what it opens in.