Odyssey of trying to convert several utf-8 encoded text files into MS-Word *.doc files

[Omer Zak]

Hello Matan,
Thanks for the suggestion.

The unoconv version 0.3-6 package in Debian Squeeze still depends upon
some OpenOffice packages, which conflict with some LibreOffice packages,
which I don't want to uninstall.

However, I do have the Python uno module installed.
I was referred by LibreOffice's help (search term 'API', item
'Programming LibreOffice') to http://api.openoffice.org/ and from there
found a code snippet for importing a plain text encoded with a given
character set at
http://codesnippets.services.openoffice.org/Writer/Writer.ImportingAPlainTextEncodedWithAGivenCharacterSet.snip
However, the code itself is missing - seems to have been removed at some
time (nevermind the fact that it is said to be written in OOBasic rather
than in Python/Java/CPP).

Yet another possibility is to write a script in OOBasic, to be invoked
from within LibreOffice.

At the moment, conversion into HTML seems to be easier for me (I found
that AbiWord can import an HTML file with suitable font declarations,
and set the font correctly) - as it doesn't require me to cram yet
another programming language (one less yak to shave!).

--- Omer


On Sun, 2011-11-27 at 00:31 +0200, Matan Ziv-Av wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Nov 2011, Omer Zak wrote:
> 
> > I need to convert several utf-8 encoded text files into MS-Word *.doc
> > format.  So I need to accomplish it from the command line.
> > In Linux, it is easy to find tools to convert from MS-Word formats into
> > text, but a Google search failed to yield converters in the opposite
> > direction.
> >
> > I tried two word processors:  LibreOffice and AbiWord.
> >
> > LibreOffice (version 1:3.4.3-3~bpo60+1 in Debian Squeeze - yes, it's a
> > backport) allows you to perform the conversion, but you must go through
> > a GUI.  I did not find instructions how to accomplish this from the
> > command line.
> 
> Libreoffice has a headless mode, where it accepts commands from a pipe. 
> unoconv is a nice command line front end for this mode.
> 
> Libreoffice also has --convert-to option. Try libreoffice --help to see 
> all options.

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