[Officeshots] interoperability testing

[Michiel Leenaars]

Hi Milos,

> Perhaps there is a chance in Bratislava to set up a Windows machine with
> running MSO 2007/10/13 for our testing purposes. If you find that
> interesting, I  can ask Microsoft representatives here in Bratislava, if
> they would be willing to donate the necessary licenses.

I have some licences for testing machines for MSO 2007 for you. John 
Haug or Jim Thatcher might be able to provide copies for c2010 and 2013 
- as he and Doug have done in prior instances - I will send their 
contact details to you off list.

There is no reason other document conversions shouldn't work with minor 
modifications, I think we designed it generically. Of course there are 
no validators for the binary formats for instance, but it would be 
useful without already as Jos remarked.

OfficeConvert is able to already handle all conversions that MS Office
performs, and the Officeshots python factory is trivial to change. I 
think the biggest part is for someone to go through the Officeshots 
server code, and dig into the definition of file types. And of course we 
need to fit it into the UI.

Anyone on this list fluent enough in PHP to go there?

Best,
Michiel

> Regarding the officeshots API: would it be possible to use it also to do
> other types of conversions, not only odf->odf->pdf? Currently, within a
> larger project, I work on a user study, which would enable for
> quantitative  evaluation of a "level of interoperability" between office
> applications on the basis of various document standards. The study is
> based on automated conversion of documents (similar to the officeshots
> framework, only running locally). Conversion by AOO, LO an Google Docs
> is already implemented this way (not a big deal, GD using their API). I
> would, however like to convert the documents also by MSO. I hope that
> using the officeshots API and the above mentioned machine it would be
> possible.