Subject: Re: standalone import/export
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Sun May 20 2001 - 15:59:40 CDT
On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 04:00:01PM -0400, Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
> Are the importers/exporters for abiword available in a standalone form
> for the command line? I would like to test the latest HTML exporters
> without attempting to recompile all of abiword from scratch on my
> 32M 200Mhz Pentium I.
>
> I even think it would be more robust to make the importers/exporters
> separate programs anyway. That way, they could not crash AbiWord itself
> when hitting a bug. This would also make it easier for semi-technical
> end users to whip up a Lex filter to import wierd legacy documents (ever
> heard of PC-write?) and use it from the GUI - without having to download
> and compile all of AbiWord.
>
> Furthermore, a user might have a whole directory tree of documents they
> want to convert. Import/export is essentially a batch process ideally
> suited for the command line.
The answer is yes and no. No, you can't compile the importers and
exporters into their own binaries. They depend much too much on the
internals of AbiWord for the intermediate representation. But, the
good news is that you can used the abiword binary on the command line
to convert files, like so:
$ abiword -to html foo.abw
and that produces foo.html.
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