From: Hal Vaughan [mailto:lists@halblog.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 12:49 PM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Non-PDF Portable Document Formats (Exporting
from LO)
I'm working on an e-reader for special purposes. While I don't want to go
into a discussion of the point of this program and why I'm doing another, a
brief summary may help. As a writer, I don't like sending my work over email
or other insecure methods of internet transfer. This e-reader would let me
(and my writer friends) share our work easily with our friends while keeping
it encrypted during transfer and even on the reader's computer. The file is
read in and decrypted when displayed for reading. This would also let me
make early drafts expire so they can be ditched when they're obsolete.
I still haven't decided what language to use for this. Initially it'll work on OSX,
Windows, and Linux. I'd like to expand it to Android and iOS. There's a good
chance it'd be in C++ or Java, but it would be great if I could do it in Python. (I
know of Kivy and other efforts that would make it easy for me to transport
Python to at least Android.)
The problem is I need some kind of portable document format. I know that
implies, immediately, PDF. However, there seems to be only one library that
handles PDF display, and that's Poppler. I'm not an expert programmer (at
least not in C++), and when I've asked for help from the Poppler people,
they've been abrupt and less than helpful.
I'd like to be able to write in LO, then save or export my file, and have it in a
format I can easily display on the different operating systems.
I tried saving some files in HTML. The plain text ones were no problem at all.
Margins and formatting was preserved just as I needed it. But then I tried
one that was part of a pitch, so it had a page of text, then a page of pictures,
basically two columns of pictures with captions below each picture. I loaded
that in a browser and the formatting was okay on the first page, but was
totally messed up on the 2nd page with the pictures.
As best I can tell, at this point, there is not a portable library out there that I
can use from within a program to easily display ODT files, but that would be a
great solution.
So what format can I use when exporting from LibreOffice, other than PDF,
that can be easily displayed by any libraries in either Java, C++, or Python?
Thanks!
Hal