Ken Foskey <[email protected]> writes:
> On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 09:09 +1100, Peter Chubb wrote:
>
>> How do other people deal with these weird documents? Is there an easy
>> way to view or convert them (NOT using Gnome or OpenOffice or other
>> heavyweight GUI tools)?
>
> Unfortunately Word is not a specification just a jungle of data that has
> grown from the first version till today. This means that it is really hard
> to import these documents. OOo hired the expert who reverse engineered the
> format for other FOSS tools and therefore it is a really robust strong
> product. Tables are a major problem, even for OOo, I cannot import the
> Scouts forms because of their tables cleanly and they keep changing them
> every 3 months lately, total pain.
>
> OOo is your only real choice.
*nod* I have the same issue, and the same preference to avoid OOo for just
reading the documents. I never did find a solution that didn't require it,
though, which was sad.
OTOH, the 'unoconv' tool makes it a bit nicer: it wraps up the automation
required to use OOo to convert documents /without/ needing to show a GUI or
whatever, driven from the command-line.
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/unoconv/
>From the original README:
Since OpenOffice 2.3 you do not need an X display for starting ooffice.
However you may need the openoffice.org-headless package from your
distribution. Since OpenOffice 2.4 nothing special is needed, running in
headless mode does not require X.
Regards,
Daniel
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