Best Open Office Plug In’s for Desktop Publishing

Open Office is a good piece of software for the desktop publisher's arsenal of applications. In addition to the fact that it functions smoothly, it also comes at no cost to the end user. It's hard to resist a good piece of software that comes for free. But if you want your Open Office to go from good to great, then a few basic plug ins can help you out. Today we are going to look at two of those plug ins.

Enhanced Export Options for Bitmap Files

This extension gives you greater control over your images in Draw. It allows you to export slides or selections from OpenOffice.org Impress or OpenOffice.org Draw to either PNG, JPG or GIF bitmap files. You can also change the pixel size and some other format specific settings like the image compression factor for JPG files. Not bad at all for a plug in with such a boring name.

Tri-fold Brochure template for Draw

If you do a lot of graphics heavy brochures, this template will be far better for your needs then the one for Writer. It is pretty straightforward and easy to customize.

PubOOo

If you have clients who want to work with Microsoft Publisher files, but you do not want to shell out for Publisher, then this plug in will give you enough compatibility to get things rolling. Bear is mind that it is not perfect compatibility.

Last Session Multi

This tool allows you to automatically re-open any toolbars and settings that you used in the past ten previous sessions. It is great if you open a lot of specialized tool bars for projects, and you don't want to have to re-open them every time you work.

Lightproof Grammar Checker

If you spend a lot of time working on text heavy applications for your clients (newsletters for example) and you want to be sure that the copy is perfect, a grammar checker can help you to do that.

VisibleBookmarks

If you need to be able to find things in a hurry, or if you are working on the layout of a large project (like a book or ebook), then these bookmarks can make your job easier.

Now, all that you have to do is install your new plug ins and enjoy the fun. You can find all of the above mentioned plug in's, and more, here.