Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

[Jambunathan K]

Hello Tassilo


>> Hm, I don't know.  It mostly depends on unoconv, which in turn depends
>> on OO.org.  I have version 0.4 installed here, but at least 0.3 should
>> be fine as well.
>
> I see.  On my Debian machines (6 year-old Debian testing installation
> which has accumulated pretty much all packages I've ever needed during
> those years), I don't have unoconv installed, so I think there's a good
> chance that many people don't have it installed.  This fact I think
> gives a first answer to "should we add .doc and .odt to
> auto-mode-alist": only if unoconv is available.

Thanks for adding support for converting odt files to pdf files.

I am wondering whether it would be possible to *not* make the unoconv
the default converter.

Speaking for myself, I had troubling getting unoconv-0.4 to work on my
Windows box right from the way go - mostly due to limited patience and
ignorance of python runtime. But I had better luck with using
OpenOffice.Org's Basic macros to convert my odt files to pdf [1].

So, may I propose following minor changes to doc-view.el?

Make doc-view-unoconv-program to be either an executable (as is now) or
a function pointer with the same signature as (defun doc-view-odf->pdf
(odf callback) ...) with one another argument that says where the
resulting pdf file need to be produced.

The above changes are minor and could be easily circumvented.

In summary what I am saying is this: All that docview needs is a pdf
file and how it is generated should be configureable and left to the
user's taste. This is particularly so when unoconv and the python
bindings it implies is not a de-facto standard.

Jambunathan k.

Footnotes: 

[1]  See the .bat wrapper and the macro code here:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=39983

[2] On a related note. one can also "record macros" so generating quick
vb code for makeshift/one-off conversions from
odt->doc/rtf/xhtml/docbook would be a fairly straightforward task.

Following post has a recipe for converting using import/export filters
in inter-document conversions (The script is similar in spirit to the
way unoconv uses export filters)

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=23531

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