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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Thoughts on KOffice factory for officeshots.org
From:       Ganesh Paramasivam <ganesh () crystalfab ! com>
Date:       2009-03-09 11:57:37
Message-ID: 9ecf537e0903090456r761eb4dexdad6a8c175cfd3ef () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi all,

I'm developing a Koffice factory for officeshots.org.. Wanted to get
your thoughts on this.

Back-ground
-------------------
Office-shots.org is a web-site like browsershots that enable users to
upload their ODF documents and see the way it would be handled by
different office suites. It currently has support for OpenOffice suite
and I would be developing a new factory ( which is nothing but the
back-end) for KOffice.. I would be starting out with KWord. The
factory would be a python script which would poll a central server for
jobs and when it receives a job, it downloads the document and
launches KWord for three types of output
1. A PDF output of the document
2. A jpg screen-shot of KWord with the document open.
3. A roud trip odf version of the same document.

Requirements
--------------------
To achieve this, KWord and more generally KOffice would have to
support the following ( as you might have already guessed )

1. The ability to remotely launch and load a specific document through Python
2. The ability to remotely be able to export the document as a PDF to
a specified file location.
3. The ability to save the same document as another ODF document to a
specified file location.
4. The ability to take a screen-shot of KWord itself.

Thoughts on this
--------------------------
My initial thought process was to take a look at KOffice/Kross for
achieving this, but now I realize that there is no
straight-forward/clean way to do this.. Kross enables the loading of
scripts from another application and enables the access of the apps
internal object to the script.. So it is not possible to write a
stand-alone Python script for doing what is needed.. ( I'm just
stating the obvious here, so that I can be corrected if I'm wrong...
:-) )

So, my current plan is to take a look at the D-Bus support in KWord
and extend this D-Bus support for the requirements that we have.. This
would basically entail that we expose the same interfaces through
D-Bus that we currently expose through Kross. I'm just starting out on
KWord code-base so, I'm not sure how difficult/easy it is. I would
also appreciate if somebody could point me out to the write location
in the code-base to start this work ( and also let me know if this
support is already available fully/partially). I believe that this
would be the cleanest approach and would additionally enable the
remote scripting of KOffice application.

I would appreciate your thoughts/comments/suggestions/criticisms on this.

Thanks,
Ganesh
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