I need my users to be able to upload documents in a variety of formats, and I thought I'd use Abiword to convert them all to text.
The Abiword site gives me the source code, but there's obviously dependencies and it says I should first try using my distro's package manager instead. So, do I have a package manager already installed?
Hey there, wow, didn't know abiword could be used from the command-line to convert files, awesome. We'll need to get it installed on the servers for you. We'll try and get it done asap...
Okay, cool, thanks.
Hey guys, what kind of timescale are we talking about? Will I be able to get up and running before tomorrow?
No chance, I'm afraid. It'll take us a couple of days to build a new server image, and then it usually takes a few days to go through integration testing -- at the very shortest it's a week, but since abiword is a reasonably complicated piece of software, we may need to do some hacking to get it to work in consoles... It also very much depends on what else we have scheduled during our next iteration... So I really can't make any promises.
If you need something before tomorrow, you'll have to look at a different solution...
You could probably get this installed for .docx files: https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx And, if you can get a compiled binary antiword, you could upload that to your storage area and see if it works...
Sorry I can't be more help in the short term!
How boring. Abiword did pdf, odt, doc, docx, etc all in one, without even having to ask.
The annoying thing is, there's a self-contained Abiword called Abiword Portable that I could have just uploaded and run from a folder. But it's only been built against Windows.
Any word on when Abiword will be installed?
We are working on it as we speak. We hope that it will be available the next time we deploy a new version.
Cool. Do you know when that's likely to be? (How often do you deploy new versions?)
We're doing a deploy today, but abiword didn't make it in. We try to get a deploy out every week, though. So some time next week. We have some cool features in the pipeline, so we'll be looking to do one sooner rather than later.
Okay then. Was just worried that it would be a matter of months. I shopped for alternatives, but seems there's no good general document converters on the net that don't also require OOo or Abiword installed. Which I found really surprising.
But a week or two is fine, there's lots else I'm to be doing in the meantime. Cheers for your help.
Hey everyone, abiword is now installed, and you can use it to convert word documents to text:
evilkillerfiggin
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harry
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PythonAnywhere staff
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abiword --to=txt myfile.doc
will produce a file called myfile.txt.
I didn't manage to get it working for PDFs, but we do have another command-line tool (from the texlive package I think, or possibly asciidoc), called pdf2txt.py
pdf2txt.py myfile.pdf > myfile.txt
Should work. Let me know if that helps!
Sweet...Thanks for the update!!
Fantastic! You should all become rock stars now.
Well, Harry's well on his way to becoming a drum'n'bass MC...
a2j wants to know when Harry will fly over the pond to give us a live demo of his drum'n'bass MC skills...☺
Well, I will be at PyCon... I'm not making any promises vis-a-vis MC antics though :P
I wish I could make it...maybe next year...☺
I definitely hope you have a perfect time!!
