[odf-discuss] Quality of ODF applications

[Martin Brown]

Hi Mirko,

I work with Cathy and am a lurker on this list...

>> You can achieve server based conversion from ODF to PDF via 3BOpenDoc 
>> or 3BTransform. The former is listed in 
>> http://opendocumentfellowship.org/applications I must add the latter 
>> http://www.3bview.com/3btran.html !
>>
> Or JOOConverter - http://jooreports.sourceforge.net/?q=jooconverter
> 
> Which is open source and incidentally created and maintained by yours 
> truly. :-)

The main difference between 3BTransform and JooConverter is that 
3BTransform manages a pool of OOo instances rather than connecting to 
one that is already running. This means it can cope with processing 
multiple documents at one time, can restart crashed instances of OOo and 
avoids issues with OOo memory leaks.

> But it requires OpenOffice.org, I'd like to write a pure Java converter.

A pure Java converter would be more elegant. Maybe FOP 
(http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) could provide a basis? A first step 
would be ODF->XSL-FO->FOP. The second step would be to replacing some of 
the layout code in FOP with ODF aware components - much easier than 
starting from scratch. I wrote an XSL-FO->PDF layout engine in C++ a few 
years back. Lots of head-scratching involved... I understand that ODF 
layout is based on CSS rather than XSL-FO - probably a saner spec.

> BTW your converter seems to suffer from the same bug mentioned in my 
> first message, so I guess it must be using OpenOffice.org as well...

Yup - OOo in a managed pool. Our server integrates a number of 
conversion technologies, but the OOo module provides core functionality.


Cheers

Martin
Filtered by 3BClean from http://www.3bview.com