Document convertion

[Leho21]

There are some command line argument for openoffice, but I think they are few. I would like to see there someting like:

program --input-document=mydocument.xls --output-document=mydocument.txt --delimiter=tab

--input-document=/path/to/my/document
--print-to-file=/path/to/my/printout

And other things like that. So i can use them in bash shell scripts or bat files. Or is there any way to achieve this goal.

[DannyB]

It is not quite as simple as you would like, but it is possible because of two facts...

1. If you write macros in Basic, it is quite easy to open a document and then save it in another format. I have posted a number of examples here before.

2. It is possible to call OOo from the command line (even if it is already running) and specify that a macro be executed. See these discussions.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3772
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3196
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2619

You can also get some programming examples of how to convert documents from here....
http://kosh.datateamsys.com/~danny/OOo/Examples/Conversions/
These look like empty drawings, but see the macro code within the document for examples of opening and converting documents.

You can probably adapt any of the above examples to convert from any format into any other format, simply by specifying the name of the correct import and/or export filters.

In the past I have posted
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3549
a list of the names of import and export filters for OOo.

Usually, you don't need to specify an input filter. Just do the loadComponentFromURL(), and OOo will figure out what the incomming document type is based on the extension. You always need to specify the filter name on the storeToURL() method.

There are a few pathologic cases where OOo's type detection works against you at the loadComponentFromURL. One recent example is in converting HTML into Word. Sorry I don't have a link to the discussion, but it was recently discussed in this forum. The problem was that OOo would open an html file as a Web document. A web document has very few export optiosn. The trick was to use an Import filter to cause OOo to open the html into a Writer document, which has many export options, including Word. One of the conversion examples linked above does show the use of an import filter to convert Html to Word.


Here is some additional information....
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4071


Finally, if you just need to convert a batch of documents from one format to another, I have written a macro which may be useful. It has a wizard-style dialog interface. It doesn't support every possible input and output filter, but it does a wide variety of useful conversions. Get it at
http://OOoMacros.org
it is called Document Converter.
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[Leho21]

BIG thanks for your BIG help.