> On 12 Mar 2015, at 12:42 pm, Franz de Copenhague > <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have created my first Python binding patch http://bit.ly/19dpO54 > Please, let me know how to procedure and any feedback is welcome. > > So far, there are only 2 functions in the Python API. > > import dfutil > Import dfconvert > > dfutil.normalize("other.html") > dfconvert.get("input.docx", "output.html”)
Wow, that was fast! I’m pleased to see you were able to put this together so quickly. For the record, I’m a big fan of Python too, and am using a lot for server-side functionality in my day job. So I’m all in favour of using it for our server-side code. (although I do lean towards Python 3, due to its unicode support). I’d like to merge in your patch, but I believe I need to confirm if you have previously signed an Apache contributor license agreement (http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt <http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt>) (can someone who’s been around a bit longer than me confirm whether patches like this require an ICLA, or this only required for commit access?). On the topic of API, as I think Jan has mentioned, we’re still somewhat undecided on exactly what the DocFormats API should look like, outside of the three basic conversion options (get, put, and create). For doing these conversions, I would actually suggest it would be useful (and safer) to launch dfconvert as an external process, so that in the event one is running a Python web server doing lots of conversions as people open/save documents, then in the event of the conversion process crashing, the web server will keep running and can simply report that there was an error during the conversion. That is, it wouldn’t bring down the whole python interpreter. However, I think it’s definitely desirable to have these functions accessible through a Python API as well, so that they can be used as part of a wide range of programs. And this is even more the case for other functions that do things like manipulate the document, using the HTML DOM and CSS APIs. There are all sorts of applications in this would be useful - such as a web application which accepts (or generates) forms to fill out that are in .docx format, and needs an easy way to get at the information in the forms. This is just one example. As you get to learn more about the library, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the API and what some of the scenarios you think it would be useful, outside of just conversion. — Dr Peter M. Kelly [email protected] PGP key: http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key <http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key> (fingerprint 5435 6718 59F0 DD1F BFA0 5E46 2523 BAA1 44AE 2966)
