On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 13:51:00 at 01:51:00PM -0700, Evan Edwards (evan@onepaper.com) wrote:
> 
> This actually brings up a minor point that I always kinda wondered about.  
> What is the scope of KOffice?  I.e., is there a place for small "helper" 
> applications that provide functionality based on or towards KOffice 
> applications?  Even things like shell scripts or other non GUI based tools 
> that work with file formats or dcop?
> 
> I've written a small number of such tools, some of which may be generally 
> useful to people.  Scripts that gather information and assemble documents or 
> that assemble multiple documents together.  Some are very customized (my 
> SciFi Show script, for instance, grabs news and puts it together for a radio 
> program's quick notes), but others are more general purpose.
> 
> I even have a PHP "kword_stat()" function that pulls info from a kwd file.
> 
> Any interest in these?
> 

Evan, Nicolas and all,

I think there is a whole lot of interest, and a huge potential for
this kind of things. Scripting an office suite, or scripting for it
can automate any conceivable task: grab data from system logs or any
database from 10 different files (perl/awk/sed...) load them in
different KOffice documents (like spreadsheets which do fancy graphs
out of them, print or email those documents...all from a crontab
script... sounds wonderful.

There is somewhere a KOffice plugin to extract metadata from OOo
files: having that accessible from the shell would be great too.

When you make it possible over the web, either interactively like your
PHP example, or automatically, it also starts to sound like web
services done right, without the hype.

Please do it, and publish your script if you like: it doesn't matter
how special purpose they are, what matters is to show people what can
be done.

A good example of other uses may be the scripting capabilities of
AbiWord 2 (I haven't tried it yet, but the slideshow given at Guadec
2003 sounds really promising about this same set of features)

Ciao,
	Marco Fioretti
-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
                                      -- John Naisbitt, Megatrends
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