Re: [Groff] OpenDocument to troff converter

[Gunnar Ritter]

Larry Kollar <address@hidden> wrote:

> This sounds extremely promising. I haven't had a look (yet), but if it works 
> as 
> advertised, it would be a great way to rescue documents from MS Word since 
> OOo does a pretty good job of reading them (indeed, I've seen it do better 
> than Word with corrupted files).

Possibly, but it must be noted that a converted Word document
normally does not contain enough information to "rescue" it
automatically, at least not if you expect the markup to be
comparable to that used with troff macro packages. For
example, in the XML output for all Word documents read by
OpenOffice I have seen so far, there are no <text:h> tags,
and section headings are represented as regular <text:p>
paragraphs, with only a different font weight, font style,
or paragraph alignment in the associated style. Thus they
become marked as .P in the troff representation; to mark
them as .H, you have to expect some handwork.

> Gunnar, could you post a direct link to the script?

You can download the current version from the online
CVS repository at
<http://heirloom.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/heirloom/heirloom-doctools/stuff/odt2tr.xsl?revision=1.13&content-type=text%2Fplain>,
but unless you want to participate in development, I
would generally recommend to stick with the release
packages available at
<http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html>.

        Gunnar