Star Office, Open Office and earlier LibreOffice versions
Support for these and some earlier releases remains available in CopiaFacts version 8.x.
LibreOffice 7.x and later (and version numbers yy.mm)
 | After upgrading to LibreOffice with a version number YY.MM (from 24.2 onwards) it is important to open and then close LibreOffice once, before trying to run CopiaFacts applications to convert Office documents with Libre. CopiaFacts supports LibreOffice in a number of ways. The use of LibreOffice can eliminate the requirement to install Microsoft Office on a machine or machines which run the CopiaFacts Document Converter (FFEXTERN), and for smaller CopiaFacts systems may eliminate the need to run the Document Converter at all. |
| We recommend only using the latest LibreOffice stable release (currently 25.8). Some earlier releases had issues which made automation unreliable. |
| Unlike for Microsoft Office, you should select the LibreOffice installer which matches the bitness (32-bit or 64-bit) of your operating system. |
To download LibreOffice, go to https://www.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice remains free, although paid support options are now promoted for business users, and donations are welcomed.
Using LibreOffice for CopiaFacts document conversion has the following advantages:
•The Document Converter print driver is not required.
•You do not require Microsoft Office installed on document converter nodes.
•The 'speckle' round text characters can be reduced using image options, and other customization of the conversion is also possible using these options.
•Output TIF files can be made dramatically smaller using image options, and therefore can be transmitted more quickly.
•In addition to Office documents, you can also convert Open Document Format files (.ODT .ODS .ODP).
•Supported documents can be opened in FFVIEWER to check the conversion, or so that they can be manually saved as TIF files.
•Unlike for Microsoft Office, LibreOffice called from applications running in service mode is not deprecated.
LibreOffice can be used for converting Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, including the supported Office 2007 formats. It is generally more straightforward to use than the Microsoft Office equivalent, but there may be some very complex documents which it cannot handle. Note that Excel files are expected to contain 'documents' not spreadsheets; Excel documents and PowerPoint slides should be approximately letter-sized for use as TIF attachments.
| Important: on a machine where you perform CopiaFacts conversions using LibreOffice, do not attempt to use LibreOffice also as a normal desktop application. |
To use LibreOffice for Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, add the keywords LODOC (X), LOXLS (S) and/or LOPPT (T) respectively to the $convert_options command in the user profile referenced from the FS file, or in the FS file itself. You can also use the option letters on the CVTOPTS environment variable, or use command-line options -X -S or -T on CVSINGLE when run standalone.
Note that the keyword LODOC specifies that LibreOffice should be used for both DOC and DOCX files, and similarly for the other keywords.
All supported versions of LibreOffice can save Office files as PDF. CopiaFacts therefore uses a 'via PDF' conversion method for Office documents, where LibreOffice is automated to save as PDF and then the intermediate file is converted to faxable TIF using the built-in converter. The document size of the PDF document matches that of your original document, and any scaling required to fit a faxable TIF format is controlled by the configured image rendering options.
Loading Office Documents in FFVIEWER
If you have LibreOffice installed, you can open the supported documents for viewing as a TIF. This allows the use of the Image Options Editor in FFVIEWER to adjust conversion and rendering options for Office document conversions.
Note that FFVIEWER does not support Microsoft Office to pre-convert Office documents to PDF for conversion and viewing in FFVIEWER.
If you are using the default conversion method for Office documents (Microsoft Office conversion via PDF), the conversion adjustments you make this way in FFVIEWER will apply equally to LibreOffice and Microsoft Office conversions, because they are both made after the intermediate color PDF has been create while it is being converted to monochrome faxable TIF.
Built-in Conversion of Office Documents in COPIAFACTS
If you have LibreOffice installed, and if your COPIAFACTS engine is lightly loaded, you can enable built-in conversion of supported Office documents. Coupled with the existing options to use built-in conversion of PDF and HTML documents, this completely removes the need to run the Document Converter (FFEXTERN).
| Do not use this option if your COPIAFACTS system is used for fax broadcasting. |
| Do not use this option if each Office document will contain more than a few pages. |
| Do not use this option if your COPIAFACTS engine has a large number of fax channels or is continuously sending faxes. It will seriously impair throughput and may result in memory overload. Use the Document Converter instead to maximize the availability of fax channels. |
| Do not use this option if your fax channels handle inbound faxes as well as outbound. Incoming faxes cannot be received on a channel which is handling conversion of a document for outbound transmission, so you risk missing inbound calls if all fax channels are busy. |
To enable built-in conversion of Office documents, remove the corresponding keywords (DOCX, XLS etc.) from the $convert_types command in FAXFACTS.CFG, or specify them as None in the corresponding box in the Document Converter Options dialog in FFEXTERN. The Office documents will then be converted when named on a $fax_filename FS command, provided your machine running COPIAFACTS has LibreOffice 7.3 or later installed.
LibreOffice can also be used to pre-convert 'at send time' PDF originals containing PDF features not supported by Copia's PDFIUM and 'original' renderers. This is enabled with an FS variable PDFLIBRE set to a non-empty value.
