Import the narrative into LibreOffice

Templates and Showcase
1

Because I don’t use Scrivener, I wrote myself a macro for LibreOffice that extracts various synopses and reports from the CSV export file of Aeon Timeline 3 and creates ODT text files from them.
It uses part of the data structure given in Aeon’s “Novel” template. The narrative numbering scheme has to be set to “Outline Style”.

For general use, I have made an extension for LibreOffice 7. It is open source and free, but still in the experimental stage, so users should check for updates from time to time.
At the moment I am still trying to understand the native .aeon file format so that in a later version the intermediate step of CSV export can be omitted.

If you want to try it out, you can download the extension from my project homepage.

2

Starting from version 0.4 the LibreOffice extension can process the .aeon file format directly. CSV remains as an option.

3

Thanks for this. I am getting an error when trying to import an aeon file. Is there something else that I need to install?

com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException: Error during invoking function get_fullsynopsis in module file:///Users/stuart/Library/Application%20Support/LibreOffice/4/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages/lu4522170sxt7.tmp_/aeon3odt-L-0.4.0.oxt/aeon3odt/cnvaeon.py (<class 'AttributeError'>: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'replace'
  File "/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/Resources/pythonscript.py", line 915, in invoke
    ret = self.func( *args )
  File "/Users/stuart/Library/Application Support/LibreOffice/4/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages/lu4522170sxt7.tmp_/aeon3odt-L-0.4.0.oxt/aeon3odt/cnvaeon.py", line 5653, in get_fullsynopsis
    open_src(OdtFullSynopsis.SUFFIX, OdtFullSynopsis.EXTENSION)
  File "/Users/stuart/Library/Application Support/LibreOffice/4/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages/lu4522170sxt7.tmp_/aeon3odt-L-0.4.0.oxt/aeon3odt/cnvaeon.py", line 5609, in open_src
    globalConfiguration = os.getenv('APPDATA').replace('\\', '/') + '/pyWriter/' + \
)
4

Hi Stuart,

thank you for the error log. Is it possible that you are running LibreOffice on Linux?
If this is the case, please make sure that the libreoffice-script-provider-python package is installed. Especially with Ubuntu this is not installed by default, but is needed here for macro execution.

I have tested the extension only on Windows so far.

Cheers,
Peter

5

Hi Peter -
I’m on a Mac. Not sure if python is available by default on it or not. I’ll have another play tomorrow.

Cheers,
Stuart

6

Hi Stuart,

My extension is written in Python which is included with LibreOffice. Since I haven’t a Mac, I never had the opportunity to test an extension of mine on OS X. Anyway, I published a new version for you. v0.4.1 handles the exception that occurred in your case (trying to access a Windows environment variable on a non-Windows OS).

Just let your LibreOffice Extension Manager auto-update the aeon3odt extension.

Good luck,
Peter

7

Thanks Peter. That lets me open the file now.