Document conversion engine

[Robinson Tryon]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 5:51 AM, Flavio Moringa <
flavio.moringa at caixamagica.pt> wrote:

>
> I know that you can convert documents through the command line, using
> LibreOffice headless mode, and that can be something that's useful for
> scripting automatic tests... although I know that sometimes the main
> problems are "visual" and it's difficult to automatically detect the
> problems...
>

I think that we still need human eyes for the final comparison, however the
rest of the system could be automated a bit more -- e.g. we could put
sample docs in subdirectories named by bug# and add screenshots of the docs
as rendered in MS-Office; add in a script to have LO iterate over the
subdirectories and spit out screenshots of how it renders the original
files, and a little HTML GUI so that you can tab-through 2-ups of the
original rendering vs. LO's rendering, and you've got a decent tool for
testing improvements/regressions.

Is there any kind of repository for documents that are candidates for
> conversion testing? I mean documents which are known to have conversion
> problems, and that are used to test improvements to the filters?
>

I usually just search bugzilla for "conversion" or "formatting" :-) Even
documents attached to old bugs can be helpful, as they can serve as
regression tests.

I would like very much to become more involved in improving the conversion
> filters, since it seems to be a major problem in LibreOffice adoption, and
> everything that can be done to help in that area would certainly boost
> LibreOffice adoption specially in the enterprise world.
>

Yes, fidelity of document rendering is definitely one of the biggest
hurdles I've faced when encouraging people to try LO. Any improvements on
that front will be greatly appreciated!

--R
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20120706/e42e24d8/attachment.html>