Re: Scripting OpenOffice?

[Andreas Reuleaux <reuleaux@web.de>]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 01:59:16PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm interested in writing an automated word-to-PostScript converter. 
> OpenOffice is well capable of opening Word documents, and of printing to
> PostScript and even comes with some "simple" examples of doing some of this. 
> But I cannot find a way to just tell it from the command line, without
> opening any X windows, to do that sort of thing.  Does such a mechanism
> exist?


Openoffice comes with its own component model called UNO
which allows accessing the compononents of a (word)dokument
as programming language objects.

Programming language bindings are available in C++, Java, Starbasic
and Python (see below)

I have seen examples and documentation somwhere on www.openoffice.org 
Two of the things I remember to have seen:
  * A StarOffice Programmers Tutorial
  * some java example that used openoffice as a server
    and thereby allowing a client to send a word document and
    to receive one transformed to some other format
Both can give an impression of what can be done

I had a look at some of the examples in the debian openoffice build
tree under
/build-tree/oo_1.0.1_src/product/unxlngi4.pro/bin/udk3.0.1/examples
quite some time ago, but had not have the patience to get them to
compile though

Personally I would be most interested in Scripting Openoffice from python
There is some module already that does the job, have a look at 
   http://polysorbate.org/?work/pyuno
I posted this earlier on this list already (in July 2002)

Getting the C++ examples in the debian build tree to work (as mentioned above)
seems a prerequisite for compiling the pyuno stuff.

Hope this help and that some more people will join in on the scripting efforts.

Andreas