Python, COM and scripting Word

[Roman Suzi]

On 10 Aug 2001, Eugene Morozov wrote:

>I wouldn't say that they're excellent. They're usually very
>slow (OpenOffice on K6-450 is slower than MS Word under
>VMWare on Pentium 166!), more buggy than Word and doesn't
>handle complex Word documents correctly. That's make them an
>unusable alternative -- I have to use .doc format for my
>work, even though I prefer docbook. But this is already
>offtopic.

BTW, I used Python to produce VB scripts.
Oh... Word is very unfriendly when it comes to scripting.
I was told that I can open doc as a COM object and so on,
but I needed to do it quickly, so I used usual macros...
So, I understand why you want to script Word in Python.

And you can use docbook to generate RTF, readable by MS Word.

>> It IS more of a shame that there's no standard way to script
>> programs -- no standardized Component Object Model, but
>> rather "fragments of componentization" scattered here and
>> there (bonobo, XPCOM, ...?).  Under Win32, if you can talk
>> COM well, there are few relevant limits to what you can
>> script/automate/control/etc.  No such thing under Unix:-(.
>
>This is exactly what I wanted to say, it's just my bad
>English didn't allow me to say this so clearly.

I do not follow. UNIX has different approach to scripting: small efficient
tools, glued together by scripts. There is nothing which could be scripted
inside 'cat' or 'date', for example, but they could be used for scripting.

I heard similar opinions about UNIX/GNU Linux, but probably my projects do
not require COM's and I do not understand why developers are so happy
about COM.

As for word processing, LaTeX is script itself.

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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