command line Open Office filter

[Andrew McGregor]

--On Friday, January 24, 2003 02:21:16 +0100 Laura Creighton 
<lac at strakt.com> wrote:

> can you send me a URL?  I went to http://www.openoffice.org/
> tried a search or 7, and read a bunch of documents and still
> cannot find it.
>
> Laura Creighton
>
>

Neither can I :-(

I can find the XML-filter one, but that only does a small subset of the 
supported file formats, not including Word.  That's what I was thinking of.

I have a suspicion, based on what I've found so far, that one would have to 
start an openoffice in server mode (which is fortunately pretty small), and 
then use the UNO protocol to cause it to do things.

I can find the OO Basic script which does the conversion, at 
http://ooo.chbs.dk/english/, but no documentation on how to use it.

Unfortunately, the UNO documentation is impenetrable, and the python 
binding for UNO seems to have fallen off the web.

There's also a Nautilus/GNOME integration project at 
http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/bonobo/, which apparently allows inline 
viewing of anything OO understands in Nautilus and Evolution.  It seems to 
be unmaintained.

This seems to be a solved problem on Windows, as they perform the correct 
magic to allow the Windows Script Host to do OO Basic.  But on other OSes, 
we seem to be out of luck so far, at least for something that doesn't 
involve reading several dozen meg of stuff to figure out how to write a 
nearly trivial 20-odd line program (usual Java disease).

Andrew