Re: [Groff] Re: conversion to DOC format

[Dean Allen Provins]

Larry:

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 08:52:59PM -0400, Larry Kollar wrote:
> Dr. Dean Allen Provins wrote:
> 
> >Several suggested that I create an intermediate format (html) which
> >is easy to do, but OpenOffice.org (at least version 1.1.0, which is
> >currently installed on this system) recognizes it as such, and will not
> >allow rewriting in Word (Weird) format.
> 
> Ah. Verified with OOo 1.1.2 on OSX. What you *can* do is save
> it as an OpenOffice document (.sxw), open that in OOo, and then
> save the new file to Word format. Probably easier than mucking
> with some GPL/shareware hybrid or borrowing a Dozebox.
> 
> Back from an abbreviated vacation. Hurricanes in Florida and a
> panicky wife don't mix... guess I'll go by myself next year. :-P

Too bad about the short vacation.  Perhaps next year you'll get better
weather.

Thanks for the message about OOo 1.1.2.  I obtained a copy yesterday
evening, and sure enough, the HTML from groff once opened in OOWriter,
was exportable as SXW and ultimately could be saved as DOC format.
Unfortunately, the DOC file expanded from 3 pages to 22 (LOTS of blank
space) when I re-opened it in OOWriter.  Fortunately, saving the SXW as
RTF preserved the format, so as long as MS Word accepts RTF as though
it were DOC, then I'm away.

Thanks for your help, and the assistance of other readers on this list.

On another subject (although related), I had a look at 'pdf2word' which
as another list member pointed out, actually writes RTF.  The source is
available, but there are key header files missing.  As near as I can
tell, it is an MS Windows program, and requires a recent version of
xpdf's sources to compile.  I didn't get too far with it.  The missing
header files (to the best of my knowledge) are the following:

      DialogregP2H.h: No such file or directory
      Resource.h: No such file or directory
      datastru2.h: No such file or directory
      gfxstate.h: No such file or directory
      glist.h: No such file or directory
      playlist.h: No such file or directory
      registry.h: No such file or directory
      sbdestination.h: No such file or directory
      stdafx.h: No such file or directory
      winsock.h: No such file or directory

While poking around on the net, I came across a sourceforge project
called 'PyRTF', which is a set of Python scripts that write RTF.  When
it comes to Python, I'm an novice at best, and I had some
difficulty getting it to go using the examples provided.  After some
very crude 'hacking', I was successful, but this code is not ready for
production use yet.

I had thought that one might marry it (or something like it) to the
output code from groff to generate RTF directly, but I see (after
examining groff's output format) and reflecting on RTF that the two are
fundamentally incompatible.  Groff's output is a description of where to
put the black marks on the page and RTF is a description of how to
format text (i.e. center it, bold it etc.).

I suspect that using an approach much like Gaius did with grohtml might
be more appropriate.  I believe that he works at an earlier point in the
groff chain.  Any thoughts?

Regards from Calgary, 

Dean

> --
> Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
> Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
> http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/
> 

-- 
                         Dr. Dean Provins, P. Geoph.
                            50.950333,-114.037916
                           address@hidden
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