Unfortunately I can't participate in the GSoC status meeting today, but I would like to give a technical overview of Dmitry's GSoC project. The official GSoC starts shortly and it is important to have a clear vision of what and how he will be doing.
I'm addressing this post to Dmitry Zamula but if anyone else is interested then please give your feedback. The goal of Dmitry's GSoC project is to create a OpenOffice-free software stack to manage documents on the whiteboard. This will include support for two families of documents formats: (1) MS Office. Below is a short overview of what POI can do: 1a. PowerPoint POI can convert .ppt and .pptx files to PNG. optionally you can convert to other formats (SVG or directly to Flash). An example of a PPTX2SVG converter is include in POI examples: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/poi/trunk/src/examples/src/org/apache/poi/xslf/usermodel/PPTX2SVG.txt PPTX2SVG would use the same idea. POI renders simple files more or less OK, but more complex drawings are rendered with defects. I've seen Dmitry's bug reports in POI Bugzilla, thanks for that, but please be prepared that fixing will take some time. 1b. Word For the .doc format POI provides a WordToFoConverter. Note that there can be bugs or not supported features - WordToFoConverter is brand-new feature that was checked-in only a few months back. Also, WordToFoConverter.main() method is just a demo. To get full advantage of the WordToFo API you will need to write Java code and integrate it with openMeetings. The .docx format is not yet supported. I'm not sure what is the effort, hope not much. 1c. Excel POI provides both ExcelToFoConverter and ToHtml utilities. ToHtml may be useful when Openmeetings goes to HTML5 instead of Flash. 1d. Other formats: MS Publisher, MS Outlook and Visio. At minimum, you can extract text contents and export it to XSL-FO. See text extractors for each format. (2) OpenOffice: odf, odt, ods For these you need to look for a open-source solution compatible with the Apache Licence or write a converter yourself or continue to use OpenOffice. Here are interesting links: http://incubator.apache.org/odftoolkit/ - a general purpose java API for the ODF format attempts to transform ODT files to XSL-FO in Java via XSLT : http://code.google.com/p/xdocreport/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/office2fo/ http://svn.clazzes.org/svn/ooo2xslfo/trunk/ooo2xslfo/ Transformation of ODF to XSL-FO is a common question on the OOo mailing lists. Search the archive for more information. I propose to spend the first three weeks on POI: a week per format. By the end of each week you should demonstrate what POI can do and what it can't. Ideally, I would like to see it integrated in Openmeetings, i.e I would like to see not a Java.main() utility that takes .xls and outputs .fo, but a working code integrated in Openmeetings. Then it will time for ODF to XSL-FO via XSLT. Don't pay too much attention to quality. Prove the concept first and then will see how to improve the output. Thoughts? Regards, Yegor
