>> Html pages, word documents and pdf's. It's about the text only and the >> layout doesn't matter. >> >> Is flash the right choice for this? > > if your are talking about a standalone app (projector), I think the > answer is: no > > parsing word docs and PDF files to extract the text data isn't trivial, > in my opinion the best solution is to use existing open source > commandline tools for this, like e.g. pdftotext (part of xpdf) and > antiword or wvText (part of wv library). since there is no easy way to > call commandline tools from flash projectors, I'd recommend to either > use a flash wrapper (like zinc or ScreenweaverHX/HaXe) that can do this, > or another RAD solution like e.g. director, RuntimeRev or REALbasic.
just to show what a great tool director used to be :-), here a little standalone windows app that can extract the text contents of both PDF and MS Word files (using xpdf and antiword under the hood): http://dasdeck.com/staff/valentin/tmp/textExtract.zip it took me about 10 minutes to write it, and it would maybe take another 5 minutes to add basic HTML support, and another 5 minutes to port it to Mac. cheers, valentin _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
