accessing .docx documents

accessing .docx documents

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Lately I have been sent some documents with the file suffix ".docx" and
am at a loss to access them with command line tools. Unzip unzips them
okay, but the result is thre or four directories of things, with the
bulk of the document in a huge two line file containing an XML header
on the first line, and the entire balance of the document on the second
line.

Has anybody figured out what to do with these things? Suggestions
appreciated.

Chuck

-- 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (6% of Full)
                  My web site: www.hallenbeck.ftml.net
                      Microblog: http://identi.ca
                                --------
	If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
	then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Re: accessing .docx documents

[Chris Brannon]

Shane W wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 10:38:14AM -0400, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote:
> > Lately I have been sent some documents with the file suffix ".docx" and
> 
> They are ms-word 2007 documents. Unfortunately, I don't
> know of a Linux solution to open these. You can just use
> Word 2007 itself or I believe there is a conversion plugin

There is a tool called unoconv.  It will handle any file format that
OpenOffice can open or produce.  I think .docx is in the list of supported
formats.  It should be possible to convert these to plain text or html.

-- Chris

Re: accessing .docx documents

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 10:37:46AM -0500, Chris Brannon wrote:
> 
> There is a tool called unoconv.  It will handle any file format that
> OpenOffice can open or produce.  I think .docx is in the list of supported
> formats.  It should be possible to convert these to plain text or html.
> 
> -- Chris

Pacman couldn't find that package, but aursh did. Unfortunately it
seems to need a java runtime support package which is not installed
here. I might look into that.


Chuck



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-- 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (7% of Full)
                  My web site: www.hallenbeck.ftml.net
                      Microblog: http://identi.ca
                                --------
	If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
	then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Re: accessing .docx documents

[Jason White]

Chris Brannon  <speakup@braille.uwo.ca> wrote:

>There is a tool called unoconv.  It will handle any file format that
>OpenOffice can open or produce.  I think .docx is in the list of supported
>formats.  It should be possible to convert these to plain text or html.

There is even a Debian package for it. I haven't installed or tested it,
however.

Package: unoconv
New: yes
State: not installed
Version: 0.3-5
Priority: extra
Section: text
Maintainer: Vincent Bernat <bernat@debian.org>
Uncompressed Size: 102k
Depends: python, python-uno
Recommends: openoffice.org-headless
Suggests: openoffice.org
Conflicts: odt2txt (<= 0.3-1)
Description: converter between OpenOffice.org document formats
 This package provides a commandline utility which can convert from any document
 format that OpenOffice can import to any document format it can export. It uses
 OpenOffice's UNO bindings for non-interactive conversion of documents. 
 
 Supported document formats include Open Document format, MS Word, MS Office
 Open/MS OOXML, PDF, HTML, XHTML, RTF, Docbook, and more.
Homepage: http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/unoconv/

Re: accessing .docx documents

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Hi Jason,

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 10:59:48AM +0000, Jason White wrote:
> 
> There is even a Debian package for it. I haven't installed or tested it,
> however.
> 
> Package: unoconv
> New: yes
> State: not installed
> Version: 0.3-5

Unoconv on archlinux does the job, but it was tricky to get running.
Although it is a command line tool, it does require that an X display
be available when it is run.  It does in fact convert .docx documents,
although that extension does not appear in the list of supported
formats. 

Cheryl Hodiak pointed me to a perl script which does just as well, if
not better, than unoconv with .docx files, and does not require any X
support. However, it is a single format converter, unlike unoconv. 
Scheryl's script was called cryptically docx2txt, and is available from
sourceforge.

Chuck





-- 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (31% of Full)
                  My web site: www.hallenbeck.ftml.net
                      Microblog: http://identi.ca
                                --------
The reason that every major university maintains a department of
mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.