Re: Web Application - Word Conversion

On Mon, 1 May 2006, Dean Ernst wrote:

> Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 07:08:49 +1000
> From: Dean Ernst <dean@coolmedia.com.au>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: Web Application - Word Conversion
>
>
> Hello All,
>
> Please advise me if

yes ...

> /how

more complicated question

> abiword could be used in these ways:
>
> 1. As a server side backend solution for a web application (ruby, php,
> coldfusion??)

been there done that, definately very possible.

abiword can be used to convert documents using only the command line
options which goes something like this:

abiword --to html testdocument.doc

then you get your language of choice to exec() that command (in PHP
there are safer more secure command that allow you to do effectively
the same thing). there are other command line options in abiword you
should look at for better efficiency when batch processing lots of
documents in one go.

the upload part is standard, see any web app for example.

> to upload a word document and have abiword convert it to
> either: XML or HTML

Abiword can export XHTML
The default Abiword file format is a type of XML
Abiword also exports various other formats which are XML based

> 2. Could abiword be used to parse the word styles (ie heading1, heading2
> etc) into XML/HTML pages based on the styeles ie heading1 means a new page

I would recommend you try out some test documents and see if abiword
preserves the styles, your mileage may vary.

> Also, can I ask:
> !. Has anybody had experience doing this ie online word parsing to XML/HTML?
> If so, what was your solution?

My solution was a quick and dirty exec() type function using PHP as
outline above, not anything you would want to reuse.

> 2. Is anybody for hire to make this a reality? I really need a solution to
> the online word conversion problem and can hire someone to do it.

I'd suggest integrating abiword as part of the backend to a Content
Management System (CMS) such as Plone and avoid the web work as much
possible but that is up to whoever decides to implement this.

> 3. zohowriter (www.zohowriter.com <http://www.zohowriter.com/> ), writely
> (www.writely.com <http://www.writely.com/> ) etc have solved the problem how
> did they do it?

For all we know they could be using abiword or wv in the background :) but
it is possible they wrote their own converters. (if you were using
OpenDocument there already exist some quite useful XSLT for converting
them to HTML which would allow you to achieve the same concept so long as
you were happy using OpenDocument and not Microsoft word documents)

> Any thoughts, answers to any of the questions I have posed would be
> appreciated.

Best of luck

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

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Received on Sun Apr 30 23:32:07 2006