WPS Office

With the latest SlackBuilds.org update, WPS Office was added to the repository. I decided to give it a try, as I have never been too happy with Impress.

The SlackBuild script just repackages the binaries provided from upstream. So far, the office suite seems amazingly good. Really. The interface is user-friendly, it is very fast and offers good compatibility with the file formats of MS Office. Upon start, a warning window appeared, complaining about a missing font:

Some formula symbols might not be displayed correctly due to missing fonts MT Extra.

The solution was fairly simple. I googled for the font, found it here, downloaded it and placed it to the correct location for my user:

~/.fonts/mtextra.ttf

I have webcore-fonts installed from SBo and it is important to follow the recommended tweaks:

• Have /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-liberation.conf removed.
• Put the following Fontconfig setting in /etc/fonts/local.conf:

   <!-- Globally use embedded bitmaps in fonts like Calibri? -->
  <match target="font" >
    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
      <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>

Every time a component of WPS Office is started, it will open a page listing many document templates. Useful as they may be, this is something that I prefer to disable. To do it, just go to Options > General and Save and select to Start With a New Document:

Easy. One last thing — I do not like the document icons that WPS Office comes with. Just a personal preference, but I would like to keep the ones that belong to my selected GTK icon theme.

I did a quick edit to the wps-office.SlackBuild, commenting out the following lines:

# mkdir -p $PKG/usr/share/mime
# mv $PRGNAM$SRCVER/resource/mime/* $PKG/usr/share/mime

Sure, now mime type associations are not automatically linked to WPS Office, but this can easily be done in Thunar when opening a document for the first time. Yes, this may not be the most intelligent solution, but I did not want to bother.