Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

Hello Richard,

Looking at the homepage and its description, is basically looks like an
approach to make OpenOffice.org functionality available to other
languages (and also remotely to other processes).

,----[ http://udk.openoffice.org/ ]
| Uno stands for Universal Network Objects.  Uno is one of the accepted
| projects of OpenOffice.org.
| 
| Uno is the component model of OpenOffice.org.  Uno offers
| interoperability between programming languages, other components
| models and hardware architectures, either in process or over process
| boundaries, in the Intranet as well as in the Internet. Uno components
| may be implemented in and accessed from any programming language for
| which a Uno implementation (AKA language binding) and an appropriate
| bridge or adapter exists.
`----

I don't know about the consequences with respect to software freedom
here.  OO.org is LGPL, so there might be a chance that proprietary
components leveraging OO.org functionality are now easier to write with
UNO.  But that would only be the case if accessing OO.org functionality
(possibly remotely) via UNO bindings is fundamentally different from
accessing OO.org functionality in C.

>      - asking Emacs users to install the python/pyuno/UNO/OpenOffice/Java
>        dependencies just to gain ODF support is ironic given the extent to
>        which the Emacs-Devels have endeavored to keep the Emacs footprint
>        small;
>
> People who want to use ODF need to install OpenOffice anyway, so I am
> not sure this is a terrible problem.

Well, there are other free office suites that handle ODF as well, like
KOffice.

> If there's another way to do the job, it might be better.

The reason I chose unoconv/OO.org is that it required only a few lines
of elisp to allow for viewing anything OO.org can read inside emacs.

And doc-view doesn't add any hard dependencies at all.  If the required
tools for some kind of document are not installed, or emacs has been
compiled without PNG support, or if the current emacs frame is a TTY
frame, then doc-view falls back to the mode that would be used if there
was no doc-view.

Bye,
Tassilo