Docvert 3.0 Lessens Reliance On Microsoft Office 108
An anonymous reader writes "After 10 months of development Docvert 3.0 was released today. This open source web service converts DOC files to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0, and then to HTML, RSS, or any XML format. Try the ODF demo or download the source and install it on your own box. Version 3.0 comes with an MS Word Plugin, FTP/WebDAV upload, and an in-browser document editor."
Please recommend compliance validation tools (Score:4, Interesting)
--jeffk++
Deja Vu Docvert (Score:5, Interesting)
I solved the issue by writing a program that ran on a Windows PC (an old one that had been discarded and was gathering dust in the closet) that received SMTP mail, detached the Word attachment, started up Microsoft's Word Viewer to read the attachment, then "printed" it to a file in PDF format and finaly SMTP mailed it back to the sender.
From then on all we had to do was forward the email to the robot and wait for a readable version to bounce back. As I used Microsoft's own Word Viewer there were no problems whenever a new version of Word came out, I just downloaded the latest viewer :-)
Re:It promises to be an interesting battle (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open XML is a transliteration (Score:3, Interesting)
Now We'll Now... (Score:3, Interesting)
As it is, there is not a snowball in hell's chance that OpenXML can become an ISO standard. It is simply a dump of the existing awful doc format into a nice incomprehensible 6000 page document, and it doesn't even use existing ISO standards. There's even a set group of banners and bullet points defined in there which can by no stretch of the imagination be called international.
I know Microsoft has managed to butter the ECMA up as their usual standards dumping ground, but I simply cannot see how they can get past the shortcomings in that article. To do so would be a huge amount of work (and Office 2007 is already using this format) and it would threaten their Office monopoly - which is what this obfuscation was about in the first place.
Re:I originally read OOXML ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed... that would be nice. Try reading the article to find out all the obstacles Microsoft has thrown down to actually prevent this interoperability from ever happening
Re:Deja Vu Docvert (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I smell a tiny fib.
I would have believed you if you had told me that you used Windows' (native since 3.1) Apple Laserwriter printer driver set up to print to a file, then mailed the resulting (PostScript) file to yourself to print or view with GhostScript/gv.
Well, except that I didn't think the Word viewer was released until either '95 (or as late as '97?), and it was released because MS broke the Word 6.0 (Office 4.3) document format, which was in fairly widespread use at the time (putting Wordperfect 5.1 out of business).