Thessalonica’s toolbar
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Older versions of Thessalonica had been modifying the OpenOffice.org top-level menu, adding its own items. These items were used to access Thessalonica’s functions. Beginning from Thessalonica 3.0 this menu is replaced with a custom toolbar, which has nearly the same functionality. The most important advantage of the new approach is that Thessalonica now can indicate the current keyboard state, which was impossible with the previous versions.
Thessalonica’s toolbar
The new toolbar (called “Thessalonica”) appears when you run OpenOffice.org first time after installing Thessalonica. It is available only from OpenOffice.org Writer, because only text documents are currently supported by Thessalonica. It contains the following controls:
Customize
KeyboardThis button allows you to run the Keyboard Manager.
Keyboard StateThe intended purpose of this image button control is to display an image associated with the currently selected layout. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in OpenOffice.org 2.1. You can also use this button for cycling through available input methods.
This drop-down box represents the most important toolbar control: it allows to select any of available layouts (or “input methods”), or disable them all by choosing the “[Disabled]” item. The control also serves to indicate the keyboard state by displaying the name of the currently selected input method.
Universal ConverterUse this button to run the Universal Converter.
The new GUI implementation has also a few disadvantages, which, however, cannot cover the positive side. First of all, the support for custom toolbars with complex toolbar controls (such as drop-down boxes) was first introduced in OpenOffice.org 2.0.3, and its implementation is a bit crude at the time this manual is written. The most important problems are the following:
As I have mentioned previously, it is impossible to dynamically change the displayed image for an image button control;
sometimes OpneOffice.org seems to incorrecly calculate the size of custom toolbar controls with a variable width (such as drop-down buttons). In this case some controls are not displayed, and the user has to manually resize the toolbar (or change its layout to vertical) to ensure that they are still there. This behavior affects only floating toolbars, and so, if you encounted this problem, a possible workaround is to always keep the Thessalonica toolbar docked.
Another limitation of the current approach is that custom toolbar controls must be initialized before they can be used. This means a special code should be executed each time you open or create a Writer document. Executing this code doesn’t take any significant time by itself, but, of course, it requires the Java virtual machine to be initialized too, and this initialization may take a few seconds, although it is normally performed only once in each OpenOffice.org session. So you should be aware that with Thessalonica starting OpenOffice.org Writer may take a bit more time when usual.
Except the main toolbar, Thessalonica installs two menu items (“Customize Keyboard” and “Universal Converter”) into a submenu in Tools->Add-Ons (the standard place where custom menu items installed by extension packages should go). One more menu item is installed to the Help menu: it allows to display this help manual in a web browser.
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