Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

[Tassilo Horn]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     > Is it feasible to implement of saving a buffer with formatting in ODF
>     > using this feature?  That would be really great.
>
>     No.  DocView is only a viewer for a large set of document formats.
>     Internally, every page of a document is converted to a PNG image that is
>     shown in an emacs buffer.
>
> Is there any chance of extracting the text as text
> with markup in a format that Emacs could handle?

Yes, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice can export to DocBook-XML, [X]HTML, RTF,
MediaWiki, and LaTeX via the UNO bindings and the unoconv tool.  I have
no idea how good these exporters are.  doc-view.el only uses the PDF
export, and at least that's pretty good.

But I think that conversion from and to ODF is not the right approach to
support ODF editing in Emacs.  Imagine a colleague sends you an ODF file
she created using LibreOffice, you convert it to something Emacs can
handle, do some minor editing, convert back to ODF and send it away, the
chance are very high that some information were lost in one of the two
conversion steps.

Bye,
Tassilo