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Docvert 3.0 Lessens Reliance On Microsoft Office

Posted by kdawson on from the weaning dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After 10 months of development Docvert 3.0 was released today. This open source web service converts DOC files to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0, and then to HTML, RSS, or any XML format. Try the ODF demo or download the source and install it on your own box. Version 3.0 comes with an MS Word Plugin, FTP/WebDAV upload, and an in-browser document editor."

7 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. I originally read OOXML ... by alispguru · · Score: 5, Funny

    as:

    Object
    Oriented
    X
    M
    L

    and whimpered at the thought...

    --

    To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
  2. Deja Vu Docvert by ei4anb · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Way back before the web I worked in a Unix shop that was a development lab for a big multinational. Head office kept sending us e-mail with large MS Word attachments. We got tierd of having to go down to the library, where we kept the only PeeCee in the department, just to see what was in the attachment.

    I solved the issue by writing a program that ran on a Windows PC (an old one that had been discarded and was gathering dust in the closet) that received SMTP mail, detached the Word attachment, started up Microsoft's Word Viewer to read the attachment, then "printed" it to a file in PDF format and finaly SMTP mailed it back to the sender.

    From then on all we had to do was forward the email to the robot and wait for a readable version to bounce back. As I used Microsoft's own Word Viewer there were no problems whenever a new version of Word came out, I just downloaded the latest viewer :-)

  3. Re:It promises to be an interesting battle by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All true, but if it does get adopted as a standard, then MS can use this to ensure the continued use of MS Office by government agencies around the globe. If it doesn't get adopted, MS will be under pressure to provide a supported, native, OOD format.

  4. And the sad thing is... by Durkheim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...Some people think its fine that way. A friend of mine, quite pro-ms, told me that all those little strange things in the specification where normal to have backwards compatibility, and that reading the specification was a waste of time. Instead, he directed me towards a preview of Ms office 2007. Because for him, as for many more, what's important is the final product, the cuteness of the buttons, the way it works and displays its own format. Why bother using a free program that displays word documents badly, when Office is already perfect huh? I feel so misunderstood sometimes. What makes me sad is that they don't see the use of a clear straight-to-the-point format. Maybe only geeks can be horrified by this one.

  5. Re:Open XML is a transliteration by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The design requirement of Microsoft's XML format was (obviously) that it be possible to convert existing Word documents to it without any loss. In order to do this, there must be a one-to-one mapping between the .DOC semantics and the OpenXML semantics.

    The second design requirement was that the spec be developed and released quickly, before ODF had time to gain much traction. Between these two objectives, it's hardly surprising that it ended up the way it did...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  6. Re:What, like... (Oops, forgot, no xml tags.) by Mythrix · · Score: 5, Funny


    <microsoft_word_document>
    (Content of .doc file)
    </microsoft_word_document>

  7. More info @ groklaw by mario64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check out the article on Groklaw Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions for further comments. The article also has links to a couple of wiki pages with further comments.