Update on Docvert!
I love it when those I blog about show up and say hello!
Via email (thank you for your persistence - my email has been added to the About the Editors page…):
(hope one of these emails gets through — couldn’t find a contact link on cleardefinition.com)
> In the field of “things to look into”, this blog post pointed out something called Docvert, which I hadn’t run across previously. It seems like a pretty commonly-requested web document conversion service, this time specializing in producing ODT files, which AbiWord certainly can do. The blog post mentions AbiWord support, and the download page requires either AbiWord or OO.o, as well as the PHP scripts available. Would be interesting to see how it uses AbiWord - I wonder if it uses the spiffy (apparently, never used it myself
) AbiCommand plugin, or simple command line conversion… It would be great if people who do things like this would let us know and give us their feedback, it’s the open source (or free software, no flamewars please) way. Check it at http://digitizationblog.interoperating.info/?p=309 and http://holloway.co.nz/docvert/index.html
Hi, I’m the guy who runs the Docvert project, and yeah I guess emailing the people whose work I build upon is a good idea
The last time I did anything for Abiword was bug #1985 back in 2001.
The way Docvert builds upon Abiword is by getting it to do command-line conversions from MSWord to OpenDocument. It doesn’t dynamically build up the document using the AbiCommand plugin — instead it’s more about converting A to B.
After this conversion Docvert takes over and converts ODF to DocBook 5.0, and then HTML/XML*.
It can use OpenOffice.org for conversions, and from my perspective it’s about using Abiword and OpenOffice.org as mature conversion libraries. In this way users choose which conversion library is best. I’ve found that OpenOffice.org is quite good but it’s hard to keep going, what with the requirements for XVFB and all.
Anyway, thanks for telling people about the software. Cheers dude
* Going directly from OpenDocument to HTML would have been a pain in the arse… DocBook’s hierarchy of tags is easier to write unittests against (Eg, assert that all sections have titles) and it was much easier to deal with than a flat list of paragraphs and headings, a la ODF and HTML.
.Matthew Cruickshank
http://docvert.org
It might interest Matthew to know the recent improvements (nay, overhaul) of the Docbook import/export plugin courtesy of our Summer of Code student Sum1. It may also interest him to know that while AbiCommand does allow construction of docs, it can also be used for simple conversions (from Whatever to ODF, DocBook, or right to clean XHTML/CSS!) without spawning a new process each time. Google around for AbiCommand information - there should be some on Martin’s blog as well as in a nice “+site:abisource.com” Google search. I’ve never personally used AbiCommand, but I have heard of lots of folks who really like it. A bunch of patches just went in and will show up in 2.4.6 as well as the 2.5.0 development release.
Read and reply, ants!