rublog - word support

[Armin Roehrl]

Hi all,

I truly hate word, but a friend of mine running rublog in his office
thinks that rublog would get more acceptance if people could use
their word documents instead of the current .rdocs.

I first thought of exporting an uploaded word doc into .html and letting
people
reimport the .html if they want to make any changes.

Does anybody have a better idea?

Thank you!

-A.

 

[Dave Thomas]

I truly hate word, but a friend of mine running rublog in his office
thinks that rublog would get more acceptance if people could use
their word documents instead of the current .rdocs.

I first thought of exporting an uploaded word doc into .html and
letting people
reimport the .html if they want to make any changes.

If there were a Ruby library that could read a .doc, it would be easy
to add a Word input convertor to RubLog.


Cheers

Dave

 

[James Britt]

Hi all,

I truly hate word, but a friend of mine running rublog in his office
thinks that rublog would get more acceptance if people could use
their word documents instead of the current .rdocs.

I first thought of exporting an uploaded word doc into .html and letting
people
reimport the .html if they want to make any changes.

Does anybody have a better idea?

Tell them them to use OpenOffice?




I had been using Word with Blogtari, with VBA code to handle automatic
saving/conversion to plain text, followed by an HTTP post to the blog
server. It was sort of slick, prompting the user (me) with a form
showing the blog entry, title, and posting URL, giving the option of
posting the entry or going back to edit it.

It sort of fell by the wayside, as I added in some metaWeblog API
support to Blogtari and started using w.bloggar or vim+ftp to write
entries. But, in general, if a blog tool supports a known and
"standard" XML-RPC API such as metaWeblog or blogger, then writing VBA
to do the post shouldn't be that hard. (Might even exist someplace.)

Except, of course, you're writing VBA not Ruby. (If anyone knows how to
get Word to execute Ruby code much as it does VBA, please speak up. If
there were a general-purpose blog posting tool for Word, then it would
have no specific relation to Ruby, but if it were written in Ruby, then
it might be a way to get Ruby installed on more machines. I have some
ideas on how one might do this, but they're hacky.)

The idea of allowing a blog to support a native word processing format
seemed like a nice idea, so I wrote a converter class for Blogtari so
that one could upload OOo *.sxw files.

An example:
http://www.blogtari.com/index.rb/Development@A Not-Quite Roadmap.sxw
(Which now reminds me to get back to wrapping up some things ...)

Writing the same for rublog should be simple. Getting people to switch
from Word to OOo maybe less so.

A problem with using Word to generate HTML is that the resulting HTML is
crap. If one were ambitious, they could write VBA code to walk the Word
doc and emit rdoc or textile or something similar. Not that hard,
really; I've got similar code for turning Word into XML floating around.

Probably here:
http://www.jamesbritt.com/code/ProVb6XmlBookCode.zip

James

 

[Robert McGovern]

I first thought of exporting an uploaded word doc into .html and letting

people
reimport the .html if they want to make any changes.

Does anybody have a better idea?

Hmm, what you could do is have Rublog run Anitword
(http://www.winfield.demon.nl/) when the user wishes to display the
entry. That way the original doc file is there if they want to further
edit it.

Anitword is a free program which reads the word doc in and spits out a
plain text version or postscript. It works well with most things I
have ever thrown at it and would be more than fine for blog entries.

There is source code and binaries available for many platforms:

RISC OS
Linux, Unix (with sources)
FreeBSD
BeOS
OS/2
Mac OS X
Amiga
VMS
NetWare
Plan9
EPOC
Zaurus
DOS
Windows

Rob

(Note, I am not connected with this, just use it from time to time
when I am on a console and need to read a word file)

 

[Robert McGovern]

I first thought of exporting an uploaded word doc into .html and letting

Hmm, what you could do is have Rublog run Anitword

*sigh* Antiword, not anitword.