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Story: ODF-XSLT Project AnnouncementTotal Replies: 2
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dinotrac

Jan 09, 2008
1:06 AM EST 		I've played with this kind of thing a little bit myself, and I've been preaching it (not on a big scale) for several years. Even talked with an IBM guy --- development manager for Websphere --- about it back in the spring.

Glad to see somebody actually doing it in a significant way.

I have been stunned by the extent to which people who should know better - including IBM, Red Hat, and Google development honchos -- have viewed ODF as little more than the document format for OO. Talk about putting your blinders on!!

I worked, at one point, on a web portal, that received and generated documents in various forms. Just imagine how much simpler something like that is with ODF and XSLT than with just about anything Microsoft.

Companies are spending a fortune on specialized software to do what really isn't very hard with ODF and XSLT. Heck -- combine it with a headless OO (very simple to do , btw) and you can generate a pile of outbound formats after you've created your customized docs.
Sander_Marechal

Jan 09, 2008
1:29 AM EST
Quoting:Heck -- combine it with a headless OO (very simple to do , btw) and you can generate a pile of outbound formats after you've created your customized docs.


Actually, that's exactly what we're doing here. I've written a document conversion server that can pretty much convert anything to anything. One of the components is a headless OOo to do office document conversion (other components include image conversion, etcetera). You can even talk to it using XML-RPC. I've written a Nautilus plugin for it. I can simply right-click on a .doc file in Nautilus and in the contect menu it will list "Convert to OpenDocument", "Convert to PDF", etcetera. The conversion possibilities are also provided by the conversion server, so I can easily create new conversion possibilities on the server and Naulilus will list them automatically.

This conversion server + Nautilus client is the next project from Tribal Internet Marketing I am allowed to release as Free Software.

What we do here is quite simple. Various applications generate report or invoice data in XML. A cron-job picks these up and uses ODF-XSLT to create OpenDocument Text documents. Some documents then go to the conversion server and are converted to PDF. Other documents are sent to employees, who edit them and then convert then via the plugin to PDF.

Easy!
Sander_Marechal

Jan 09, 2008
3:18 AM EST 		PS: Here's a screenshot of my Nautilus plugin in action when clicking on an MS-Word document

http://www.jejik.com/sander/filevert-nautilus.png

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