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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was originally made in Texmacs) it is possible to translate it into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,

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

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----- End forwarded message -----

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• [address@hidden: Re: [TeXmacs] openoffice to texmacs], Joris van der Hoeven, 12/02/2005

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