Re: Document conversion engine

Hi Michael,

first of all thanks for replying.. I was thinking no one would :-)

From your reply I assume that testing the filters, and doing regression
tests is something I could do, maybe identifying the main conversion issues
in groups of documents and kind of creating a "major conversion issues"
table, and prioritizing those issues. Is there already something like that?

I know that you can convert documents through the command line, using
LibreOffice headless mode, and that can be something that's useful for
scripting automatic tests... although I know that sometimes the main
problems are "visual" and it's difficult to automatically detect the
problems...

Is there any kind of repository for documents that are candidates for
conversion testing? I mean documents which are known to have conversion
problems, and that are used to test improvements to the filters?

I would like very much to become more involved in improving the conversion
filters, since it seems to be a major problem in LibreOffice adoption, and
everything that can be done to help in that area would certainly boost
LibreOffice adoption specially in the enterprise world.

Thanks
Flávio

2012/7/5 Michael Stahl <mstahl@redhat.com>

> hi Flavio,
>
> On 03/07/12 12:45, Flavio Moringa wrote:
>
> > I chose as my masters dissertation investigation topic trying to improve
> > the document conversion engine in LibreOffice (ex: converting docx to
> > odt), and as such I would like to know who is working on the conversion
> > engines and how can I help.
>
> the document conversion engines in LibreOffice are called Writer, Calc,
> Draw and Impress.  conversion from e.g. DOCX to ODT happens by importing
> the DOCX file with the DOCX import filter into Writer, and then
> exporting the document from Writer with the ODF export filter.
>
> there are also a few filters (such as XSLT filters, and writerperfect if
> i remember correctly) that use ODF as an intermediate format, i.e., they
> import by converting their format to ODF and then importing that into
> the LO application, and export the reverse way.
>
> > I'm not a programmer, so what I'm interested in doing is something in
> > the lines of investigating the main conversion problems, identifying the
> > possible conversion flows, analysing the way the conversion flow is
> > implemented in LibreOffice, and eventually trying to improve this flow
> > somehow.
>
> it seems to me the main conversion problem is a lack of manpower to
> improve the filters.  oh, and more regression tests would be useful.



-- 
*Flávio Moringa*
Project Leader



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