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About No Thick Manuals

No Thick Manuals is a wiki that offers a growing collection of quality hands-on articles and tips to the best open source applications for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. No Thick Manuals was born on February 6, 2005. All No Thick Manuals articles and tips are released under the GNU Free Documentation License. No Thick Manuals supports open source software (see a list of projects that have received donations).

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Articles

Use the Topic index to quickly locate an article on a particular topic. Browse though all the pages in the wiki using the Index button at the bottom. The Search feature at the top of every page can come in handy when you are looking for something specific.

  • Sync everything with Conduit Keeping your documents and files in sync between multiple computers is a tough challenge as it is, but there are other factors that make this task even more difficult. Nowadays, documents and files are not only stored on a desktop machine or laptop, they are quite often dispersed over different web-based services and applications like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail. Conduit is a unique synchronization utility, which can help you to keep stuff on your laptop in sync with myriads of web services as well as other machines. Continue to read
  • Better writing with OpenOffice.org and Writer’s Tools Contrary to the conventional wisdom that a word processor can’t help you to become a better writer, you can use OpenOffice.org Writer with the Writer's Tools extension to improve your writing skills and make the writing process more efficient. Continue to read
  • SIMILE Exhibit: Data publishing for the rest of us Tools like phpMyEdit allow you to create a quick-and-dirty front end to a database, but what if you need to publish a spreadsheet or BibTeX file on your website and give your visitors the ability to dynamically sort, filter, group, and visualize the published data? For that, you can turn to SIMILE Exhibit, an impressive data publishing framework that uses plain old HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript to create Web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and data visualization. Exhibit requires neither database nor server-side coding wizardry, and you can master the tool in no time, even if you don’t have any programming experience. Continue to read
  • Creating OpenOffice.org extensions the easy way with BasicAddonBuilder So you’ve written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your website, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension. Using BasicAddonBuilder, you can create an extension in a point-and-click fashion. Continue to read
  • Quick and easy FTP backup with lftp No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are that you’ll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories. But if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Continue to read
  • Turning OpenOffice.org into a document conversion tool One of the less well-known features of OpenOffice.org is its ability to run as a service. You can put that ability to some clever use. For example, you can turn OpenOffice.og into a conversion engine and use it to convert documents from one format to another via a web-based interface or a command-line tool. JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org’s file conversion capabilities. Continue to read
  • WNotes: Creating a Writer/MySQL web application While OpenOffice.org is first and foremost a desktop office suite, it has a few powerful features that allow you to create some nifty solutions. For example, the Base application supports different database engines such as MySQL, and it can connect and manage remote databases. Moreover, the data from a remote database is available for other OpenOffice.org applications, so you can, for example, access and manipulate database records directly from within Writer. These capabilities can be put to some rather creative uses. Continue to read
  • Must-have open source applications for writers Although OpenOffice.org Writer and AbiWord top the list of open source software for those who write for work or fun, they are not the be-all-and-end-all of writing tools. In fact, there are quite a few other nifty applications that can help you to collect ideas, manage notes, edit documents, and even improve your writing. Continue to read
  • OpenOffice.org Base primer Of all four OpenOffice.org applications, Base is probably the most complicated one. It is a powerful tool that allows you to build complex databases, but this power comes at a price: if you’ve never worked with database applications, you might find Base a bit overwhelming. This article provides an introduction to the most important aspects of Base that will help you to create databases with consummate ease. Continue to read
  • Top 7 flat-file web publishing systems While the vast majority of existing open source web publishing systems rely on database back-ends, there are quite a few high-quality applications that use plain text files instead of databases to store and manage data. These applications are often called flat-file systems, and they offer a few advantages that make them viable alternatives to the database-driven applications. Continue to read
  • Learning foreign languages with jVLT and StarDict There are plenty of textbooks and teaching materials that can help you to learn foreign languages one way or another. Yet, there is no way to learn a foreign language without memorizing vocabulary and looking up words in a dictionary. This is hard and often not very exciting work, but there are a few tools that can make the process of acquiring new words and expressions a bit more tolerable and effective. Continue to read
  • Create high-quality maps with OOoHG Creating maps is by no means an easy task. While there are a few open-source Geographical Information System (GIS) applications available for Linux, they are all geared towards professional users, and as such they have quite a steep learning curve. Even if you manage to master a GIS application, you still have to produce maps, or find pre-made map templates, which quite often are rather expensive. Fortunately, there is an easy-to-use software package called OOoHG that includes everything you need to create virtually any type of map. Continue to read

Tips

  • Create flashy graphs in minutes with Graph Gear Turning plain data into shiny graphs similar to Visual Thesaurus and Visuwords doesn’t only make them look good: it also allows you to visualize connections between different data bits and makes it more fun to explore them. The problem is that creating such graphs can often require three things not all of us have: programming knowledge, time, and money. Fortunately, there is Graph Gear, a neat open source solution to effortlessly create simple high-quality Flash-based graphs. Using it, you can create spiffy graphs in a matter of minutes. Continue to read
  • Handy Linux backup scripts and commands Almost every Linux distribution worth its salt comes with rsync and lftp – powerful backup and transfer tools that can help you to keep your important data safe. But what if you don’t have time to fiddle with multiple settings? No problem. Here are a couple of rsync and lftp command samples you can use to create your own backup scripts in a matter of minutes. Continue to read
  • Russifying Ubuntu Although it may sounds as a daunting task, russifying Ubuntu is rather easy. This tip show you how this can be done. Continue to read

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