mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

About the openoffice converters.

----- Forwarded message from George Goguadze <address@hidden> -----

X-Original-To: address@hidden
From: George Goguadze <address@hidden>
To: Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] openoffice to texmacs
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new-20030616-p10 at math.u-psud.fr

Joris van der Hoeven wrote:

>On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 01:55:59PM -0500, Ted Sariyski wrote:
> 
>
>>Is it possible to convert openoffice documents to texmacs format?
>>   
>>
>
>Currently, no. George Goguadze in the CC started such a project
>a couple of years ago, but this was never officially released.
> 
>

Dear all,

the work I did on the transformation of OpenOffice Documents to Texmacs 
and backwards was a side product
of my experiments with Alberto González Palomo, when we tried to adapt 
OpenOffice and Texmacs for producing OMDoc format for representing 
mathematical Documents  in a semantic  way.  The  information about 
this  attempts  can be  found in  the paper  presented by us  at  the 
Mathematical Knowledge Management Symposium in Edinburgh in 2003 :

http://www.activemath.org/~george/work/pubs/authoring.ps

As I have produced an omdoc document from OpenOffice and then converted 
it to Texmacs xml and imported into  Texmacs. This way I have 
automatically obtained a conversion from OpenOffice to Texmacs. Finally, 
I just decided to make a direct conversion stylesheet just to see how 
the microsoft word document  would  look in Texmacs.  After 2 hours of 
work I got a surprisingly similarly looking document presented in Texmacs.

For more serious conversion much more work is necessary, but it is 
certainly possible.
There are some technical issues to solve such as, for instance, how to 
convert images and so on.
The big issue is,  however, converting mathematical formulas.

For the translation from MS-Word, OpenOffice to Texmacs:

1. If the formula is written in the Microsoft Office Equation editor it 
needs special handling
2. if the formula is written in the  OpenOffice MathMl editor it needs 
special handling

For the translation from Texmacs to OpenOffice /MS -Word

1. If the formula is written in Texmacs (meaning that the whole document 
was originally made in Texmacs) it is possible to translate it into 
MathMl format supported by OpenOffice or possibly to MS-Word Equation 
format.
2. If the formula is imported from a latex document which defines custom 
macros or using custom styles - even if Texmacs finds a way to handle 
those, the custom macros will have to be propagated to the Texmacs to 
OpenOffice conversion stylesheets.

Another thing I did not touch was the character encoding issue.  I have 
converted the text written in English, so it was no problem.
The problem is that Texmacs (as far as I know) does not support Unicode 
or at least did not at the time (November 2003).

In any of the cases some additional instability might be caused by the 
interoperability problems between OpenOffice and MS-Word if one really 
needs to deal with MS-Office Documents originally.

Actually, I was not only converting Text documents, but also Power Point 
/OpenOffice Presentations and all other types of documents in 
OpenOffice, since they are all represented in the same XML  format.  The 
OpenOffice Document consists of a zip -archive consisting of XML files 
and media objects (if any).  The main XML file is called content.xml and 
contains the structure and the data of the documents annotated with 
identifiers of style elements  contained in the file styles.xml.
So, in principle, the conversion can be considering or skipping the 
style information, or even customizing the look of the document.
The separation of content and presentation has made the transformation 
easier.


I am not working on this conversion at the moment due to the lack of 
time, so the fact that I stopped working on it does not mean that it was 
too difficult.

Best regards,

---

George Goguadze
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Saarland
Saarbruecken, Germany
http://www.activemath.org/~george

---

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