Conversion of documents

[cjg@…]

CDSWare allows depositing users and staff to convert documents between certain formats.

We may be able to include an interface to this tool. I Believe it requres a seperate windows machine to process word files.

It may be possible to script the openoffice application to convert .doc and .ppt files into other formats.

Once an EPrints API for conversions has been worked out each conversion would be a seperate plugin. Some could just daisy chain two others.

eg. If you've got doc-->ps and ps-->pdf then doc-->pdf could be implemented using calls to those two existing ones.

[tdb01r]

A Plugin architecture will provide support for converting documents, by interfacing with back-end conversion tools (e.g. convert, OpenOffice, ghostscript etc.).

The revamped user interface workflow will allow the user to select available conversions from a drop-down list for each document, resulting in a new document being added to the eprint object.

An initial Convert plugin has been created in r1290. The core API methods will be can_convert() and convert(), to respectively get the list of possible conversions and to actually perform the conversion.