Re: Export Org mode files to (gag, barf) MS Office?

[Brandon Taylor <donnie126_2002@hotmail.com>]

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Okay. Well, I've gone ahead and installed LibreOffice, which took care of the "missing 'soffice'" problem, but like a frustrating game of Whac-A-Mole, another problem popped up. Now I'm left high and dry as to what might have happened, because after adding the location of soffice.exe in my Windows PATH environment variable, I get the following output:

Executing soffice --headless --convert-to odt --outdir "c:/Users/donni/OneDrive/Documents/" "c:/Users/donni/OneDrive/Documents/belvoire.odt"

Export to c:/Users/donni/OneDrive/Documents/belvoire.odt failed

with absolutely no rhyme or reason as to what went wrong.
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On Jun 26 2021, at 5:30 pm, George Mauer <gmauer@gmail.com> wrote:
> For anyone who has never tried it, I'll add that the open office formats are an absolute beast to export to. I can't say for sure about docx but I've done my time building a PowerPoint exporter (on top of Microsoft provided ooxml libraries even). It is complex enough that I'm not even sure such an exporter's maintenance is possible without a full time dedicated team
>
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 17:17 Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com (mailto:theophilusx@gmail.com)> wrote:
> >
> > Brandon Taylor <donnie126_2002@hotmail.com (mailto:donnie126_2002@hotmail.com)> writes:
> > > I know we’re not supposed to really even TALK about proprietary software in FOSS communities like this one, but I can’t help but wonder if someone
> > > might consider making (an) Emacs plugin(s) that allow(s) a user to export Org mode files to Microsoft Office file formats such as .docx, .xlsx and the
> > > like? Or is/are there already (a) plugin(s) in the MELPA that can do this?
> > >
> >
> > I don't think you will ever see full proprietary support for MS Office
> > file formats. In addition to the philosophical issues, there are also
> > practical constraints. As these formats are closed proprietary formats
> > owned by MS, they can be changed at will and without notice by MS, which
> > creeates maintenance problems, plus there is the risk you may run foul
> > of MS copyright or patent restrictions and you have the added overhead
> > of having to work with a format which is not openly documented.
> >
> > Probably the best you can hope for is support for open standards which
> > are also supported by MS Office. For example, ODT, CSV and maybe XML.
> > Unlike native MS formats, such open formats are likely to be even more
> > accessible (such as by other office like products) and last longer
> > because they are not based on some version of a proprietary format which
> > may arbitrarily change in the future.
> >
> > --
> > Tim Cross
>
>


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