At Sat, 21 Jun 2003 11:47:37 +1000, Geoffrey Robertson wrote: > I maintain a LAMP website for a club and I'm facing the perennial battle > with propriety formatted documents.
my sympathies on both accounts ;) > First Document: > $ file Winter03_Rally_Flyer.doc > Winter03_Rally_Flyer.doc: Microsoft Office document data > > My wife runs a comercial word processor on Codeweavers Wine to which > this doc is native so I opened it on that. It had a "save as web page" > option, so I did it. Well. Have you seen the code that this MSWord thing > spews out? It's /not/ going on my website. And people pay money for this > crap. I ended up just using the ascii and doing my own markup. try wvHtml(1) from wvware (http://wvware.sf.net/ or aptitude install wv) > Second document: > $ file Xmas\ in\ July\ 2003.php > Xmas in July 2003.php: Microsoft Office document data > > damn. I was hoping it was php. The producer of this document said > that this was produced by the "industry standard" Publisher2000. > No, it couldn't produce a pdf and no they hadn't heard of postscript. i used MSPublisher once (about 8yrs ago) and it installed a fake printer called something like "document exporter". it turned out that if you printed to this printer (from within publisher or otherwise) it produced a postscript file. at no point does it mention the word "postscript" and the default file extension is .prn (go figure). try asking them to export the file for an external publisher/printer. that should lead them to producing a postscript file, whether they know they are or not. if they get the choice they should probably choose "optimise for portability".. otherwise, the usual windows trick is to install an apple laserwriter printer (or grab the generic postscript printer windows drivers from adobe.com) and get them to "print to file" through those drivers. > 0. Arn't all Publisher document .pub? pass > 1. What the [Ff].{3,} is this foo.php? have a look. if its unrecognisable binary crap its probably a publisher file. > 2. How do I turn it into something useful? get them to "print to file" through a contrived printer. see above. > 3. Has the publishing industry realy gone to hell in a hand basket? most print shops that i've seen inside of run apple macs. but yes, they still have all sorts of issues educating their customers. -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
