Introduction

While it is relatively straight forward to install Meander, there are a couple of potential gotchas. We'll discuss handling them here.

Basic Installation

There are just a couple of steps to installing Meander:

1. install a Java 1.7 JRE or JDK (if not already installed).
2. install MS Office(r) and/or OpenOffice/LibreOffice (if not already installed).
3. run the Meander-install JAR file.

Java

Because Meander is written using Groovy and Griffon as the underlying technology, a Java VM is required to run the app. But, this is easily done - just install Java. In fact, most folks have already completed this step.

The only caveat here is that the version of Java need to be at least 1.7.

Office Suite

Because the 'output' of Meander is a presentation file, it is necessary to have at least one presentation application on your system. The two applications supported currently by Meander are Impress (part of the open source OpenOffice or LibreOffice suite) and PowerPoint(r) (part of the MS Office suite). Either one works equally well.

In addition, the input source currently used for Meander is a table in a word processing file. Here again, MS Office or OpenOffice/LibreOffice provide the necessary word processing application - MS Word and Write respectively.

Note that there is no coupling between input and output applications - Writer sourced flows can be written to PowerPoint files and Word sourced flows can be written to Impress files.

At this point I don't recommend one suite over the other. The choice is really driven by your customer needs (which type of output file would they like to see) and by your team's collaboration needs (which sourcing application does everyone have). Currently there is no reason (other than cost) why you couldn't have both suites installed.

(A future feature that I'd like to add is support for JSON files for input (to allow easier retrieval of flows from a web based respository) and SVG files for output (for browser based display). If I ever get those implimented, then technically, the office suite requirement will become optional.)

Gotchas

There are a couple of bookkeeping items to watch after installing Meander:

additional DLLs needed for MS Office

You may need to explicitly install two DLLs to get Meander up and working with MS Office programs. These DLLs are what allow Meander to control MS Office applications. They need to be placed somewhere on your executable path (i.e., in one of the directories in the PATH variable). These DLLs are not required if you only use the LibreOffice or OpenOffice programs.

Actually, you only use one of the DLLs - which one depends on whether you are running a 32bit version or a 64 bit version of the MS Office suite.

For now, the easiest thing to do if you run into an "!UnsatisfiedLinkError: no jacob-1.14.3" error is to install both DLLs in the C:\Windows directory and let the system automatically determine which one to use.

I have made both DLLs available at the Download page.

outputting to OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress

One difference between using the MS Office and the OpenOffice/LibreOffice suites is that the later suite has to be running to be able to write to an Impress output file. More specifically, OO/LO has to be ready to accept remote procedure calls.

You can do this by running one of the following command before running Meander. (Whether you start the line with 'libreoffice' or 'soffice' depends on which suite you are using.) The first way will open a office suite window that will allow you to open any of the suite programs.

libreoffice -accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service"

Or, you can run the suite in the background without any visible windows. (Again, 'soffice' would be 'libreoffice' if you are using that suite.)

soffice -invisible -nostartfirstwizard -accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service"

These commands are a bit wordy, so it may be easier to remember if they are put into a shell or .bat file with a name like "start-OO.bat"

support for older versions of MS Word