Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

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

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

Hi Richard,

>     > 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.
>
> It seems reasonable to me.  In principle, writing ODF support in Emacs
> Lisp would be preferable, but that's a gigantic job and it might run
> too slowly.

Indeed.  But IMO emacs is not really a WYSIWYG editor, and doesn't want
to be one anyway.  But there are some tools that convert from markup
languages emacs support to OpenDocument, like for example docbook2odf.

> Anyway, even if this implementation is not ideal, it has the virtue of
> existing.  So we may as well install it.  If another method is
> implemented later, we could install that too.

And as I've mentioned in another mail, it should also work with
LibreOffice without any adaption, so it is not true that it promotes
only OpenOffice.org and thus Oracle.

> 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.

Bye,
Tassilo