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I have documents created in Word 2010 with plain text content controls which are used as templates for letters. However when I open the documents in OpenOffice 3.3 Writer the text in these content controls is not visible.

Can anyone confirm whether or not OpenOffice 3.3 supports plain text content controls? If it doesn't is it possible that there would be a plugin which adds support?

Problem Context:

I'm having this problem during the development of an ASP.NET application which creates documents from templates (hence the content controls) using the OpenXML SDK and then uses a third party library called ABCpdf to convert the filled in document to PDF. ABCpdf uses OpenOffice or MS Office to read the Word documents; we need to use OpenOffice on the server because no license is available for MS Office.

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  • You could use docx4j to convert a docx containing content controls to PDF.
    – Plutext
    Jul 29, 2012 at 23:52

1 Answer 1

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The answer seems to be no openoffice does not support this but using openXML in libreoffice do.

I have not been able to personally confirm yes or no on the plain text controls for openoffice, but in the openoffice forums, it looks like libreoffice will, using edit: OOXML -> Open XML

Text from 'OpenOffice forums:

Re: OpenOffice + Microsoft Office compatibility
by jmitch18 » Fri Oct 07, 2011 5:01 pm

" I've opened the .docx file and found the XML for my placeholder and the content which is placed into it and all of the elements and attributes seem to be using the schema "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main" [ this is a link described by OP jmitch18, which i could not get to work ].
In which it suggests that content controls are part of the Open XML specification. "
It's best if you read the replies from this question yourself.
To install or read more about libreoffice follow this link.
Libreoffice
If you download libre 3.4.3 and install. it will not remove OpenOffice and installs over any other libreoffice without lost of data.

Just A Note:- when downloading and installing this, it changed all my word doc's into libreoffice doc's. I personally don't mind as it's not a work environment/ and is easy enough to reset the default. My simple doc's when in libreoffice seem to work ok.
I hope you find a more complete answer.

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  • That forum thread was actually started by me as well. I've added some context for my problem to the question to explain why I can't use LibreOffice
    – Jason
    Oct 10, 2011 at 10:35

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