Hello Tony,
This is Daniel Carrera (new email address).
Just out of curiosity, what you are interested in is a set of Perl libraries you can 'require' and that can handle this conversion, right? Will this program run on a standard Linux/Unix environment? You know, with command-line tools like zip, unzip, etc.
Cheers, Daniel.
Tony Mobily IMAP wrote:
Hello People,
I have just finished writing a "magazine manager" (this is the best way I can think of to describe it). I am going to release it under the GPL. It is written in Perl, the code is neat and commented. To know more about it, read [1].
I am planning on starting using it for Free Software Magazine as soon as possible.
The articles are stored in XML format: article_template_new.xml is a file which follows those specs.
The files are here: http://www.mobily.com/article_template_new.xml http://www.mobily.com/article_template_new.odt
Now: I have a _big_ problem. I really, really want to be able to accept OpenOffice documents, so that our authors can use a graphical program (OpenOffice!) to write their articles.
I'd like to use OpenDocument's format, rather than the "old" OpenOffice format.
I created an OpenOffice document (see attach) which basically follows the specs, assigning a different style to XML equivalent. I manupulated it with Word a little bit, because that's what's going to happen to it when it goes through copy editing.
Basically, we need to be able to convert our XML file into OD's (following the template's format), and vice versa.
I tried to do it myself. I didn't think it would be too hard: the document template has set styles (FSM_title for the title, FSM_author for the author, and so on). Unfortunately, a part from the fact that I am not exactly an XML expert, I couldn't work out an easy way of converting our XML file into OpenDocument. My knowledge of XML is fairly limited. I know XML, DTD, and XSLT (with XPath etc.); I thought that converting the document would be just a matter of creating a (perhaps complicated) XSLT, but... then I noticed that with OpenDocument:
* You have two files, styles.xml and content.xml, which I would need to create/read
* Every style has a screen name and a "real" name (?!?)
* Sometimes, a change of style is marked as '<text:p text:style-name="FSM_5f_ahead_5f_authors">' and some other times it's '<style:style style:name="P2" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="FSM_5f_ahead_5f_subtitle">' - I could not work out why and when this happens.
What we _really_ need is a volunteer knows XML and who is willing to help us write the XSLT (or whatever it should be!) so that we can:
1) Start using our new system
2) Release it properly in SourceForge
The most important thing is that the exporter works BOTH ways. This means that if a file is converted from our XML into OD, and then back to our XML format, the document should have the same contents.
I can't offer money, but I can offer a 1 year subscription to Free Software Magazine to the person who is kind enough to help us out, and a 1 page ad on Free Software Magazine for your company for 3 months.
Please let me know!
Merc.
-------------------------------------------------
[1]
I put together my Perl experience (not much) and my magazine-making experience (quite a lot) to create a system which does 90% of the managing work in a magazine: assigning and handing in articles, managing several editors, etc.
The system also allows you to do a word-for-word comparison of an article after each revision.
Tony Mobily Free Software Magazine http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com
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