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A comment on Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Around Google Docs. Parent comment

Re:Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Aro... by natrius on Thursday July 12, 2007 @02:57AM (#33798)
My first guess would be Abiword. In the course of putting together an open source word processor that can handle a couple of different closed file formats, they've spun off their code into libraries. The wvWare library handles Word files. http://abiword.com/projects/

As far as I know, the whole Abiword project is GPL, though that shouldn't matter much for server-side code, unless you're letting your customers host the service themselves, like Versionate seems to be planning on doing... I guess you could just pipe the output from a thin wrapper around the library to the rest of your code.

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Re:Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Aro... by martin on Thursday July 12, 2007 @01:49PM (#33870)
It could be done this way, but frankly, Abiword's Word importer isn't very good. OpenOffice's, while not perfect, is much better. Unfortunately, unlike Abiword, OOo doesn't come with a nice command-line utility for doing those conversions. OOo has a VBA-esque language that allows you to automate tasks like that, but it's a lot more suitable for more "interactive" purposes than as part of another app's backend.

Another thing to note is that some of Scribd's backend is written in C#. Maybe if your app is Windows based, there are Office API calls that let you do stuff like this. Just a guess, though.

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