Hi Steve, << I notice that your conversion isn't done by OO itself, but by ConvertDoc. Does ConvertDoc pass through paragraph and character styles? If so, this is VERY useful. Note that I don't even care if it translates the style defs -- I can just make a layout. What I want is a final doc with the styles applied, and a list of all the character and paragraph styles so I can put em all in the layout. >>
At present, it does not. ConvertDoc is a very simple python script that I wrote to automate some of the conversion steps. Right now, it basically takes the input arguments supplied by LyX, starts a version of OpenOffice, converts from .doc to .odf and then closes the running version of OpenOffice. In the (relatively) near future (depending on workload, book progress, LyX-Outline release and other things), I intend to expand the script to do other things. One conversion route from doc to lyx I've been experimenting with is through DocBook XML. People have already written style sheets and transformation scripts to faithfully go from Doc to DocBook and back (round tripping). I particularly like the idea of using DocBook because the style sheets do not require Word (which is evil) or OpenOffice (which is frustrating). An additional benefit is that it could be expanded to deal with custom style definitions. It's as simple as adding an extra input and output definition. Right now, I don't really have the time to expand ConvertDoc. It's most definitely on my to-do list, but there are a lot of items with much higher priority. Nevertheless, an expanded ConvertDoc that uses XML to convert between Word and LyX would be an excellent foundation for word2lyx. If there is someone who is interested in working on this project, let me know. I'd be happy to provide a copy of my notes, the modified stylesheets I've been playing with and a (more or less proper) spec. The biggest challenge would be gluing all of the pieces together. Cheers, Rob
