KOffice questions

[Richard Georg Bayer]

Hi.

I know you're busy working on KOffice 2.0 and I am looking forward to it!
Yet, I have some questions regarding KOffice extensibility. So here they come:


1) The most general: What are the ways of driving KOffice's actions
from the outside? 1.1) I mean can KOffice be used as a tool through
it's API to build up documents? 1.2) And other ways?

Example:
MS Word for example (please don't kill me for these lines) exposes
classes, like the MSWord.Application, .Document, .Selection, .Range
etc. etc., with which you can edit a document via API. It has stupid
limitations, can not be debugged well and Word often shows up asking
if you really want to overwrite that bloody file marked as readonly.

This applies to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Is there a similar
possibility in KOffice?


2) Was (Is) Kross available in versions previous to KOffice 2.0? I
guess not but please tell me.


3) Are these scripts you can write thanks to Kross able to drive the
application from the outside (is the same as 1.2)), or are they just
for use from within the suite (like for macros, filters etc)?


So that would be it.
Well, there is one more more KDE general: 4) How is OpenParts related
to KPart? Both are component architectures, right?


I appreciate your time with this. I would not ask these if I would
have found answers elsewhere. So thanks in advance.


Richard G. Bayer
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On Thursday 21 May 2009, Richard Georg Bayer wrote:

> Hi.
>
> I know you're busy working on KOffice 2.0 and I am looking forward to it!
> Yet, I have some questions regarding KOffice extensibility. So here they
> come:
>
>
> 1) The most general: What are the ways of driving KOffice's actions
> from the outside? 1.1) I mean can KOffice be used as a tool through
> it's API to build up documents? 1.2) And other ways?
>
> Example:
> MS Word for example (please don't kill me for these lines) exposes
> classes, like the MSWord.Application, .Document, .Selection, .Range
> etc. etc., with which you can edit a document via API. It has stupid
> limitations, can not be debugged well and Word often shows up asking
> if you really want to overwrite that bloody file marked as readonly.
>
> This applies to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Is there a similar
> possibility in KOffice?

Well, that was the intention. I'm not sure how big our dbus api is, compared
to the dcop api we had in 1.x. At one point in time the kword scripting module
was in a good state, but it got unfortunately broken again during development.

But basically, the idea is to make koffice applications externally scriptable
through dbus and internally scriptable/extensible through kross, and through
plugins written in C++.

> 2) Was (Is) Kross available in versions previous to KOffice 2.0? I
> guess not but please tell me.

Yes, but only for a few applications, like Krita.

>
> 3) Are these scripts you can write thanks to Kross able to drive the
> application from the outside (is the same as 1.2)), or are they just
> for use from within the suite (like for macros, filters etc)?

Kross is for use from within the application; dbus for use without. However,
there has been talk of automatically exposing the api defined for kross
through dbus.


> So that would be it.
> Well, there is one more more KDE general: 4) How is OpenParts related
> to KPart? Both are component architectures, right?

I think, but I'm not too sure, that OpenParts was actually the original name
for KParts. So both would be the same thing, actually. KOffice 2.0 doesn't use
KParts anymore to create compound documents: we use flake for that now, which
provides a much finer-grained object model. KOffice application still provide
parts for embedding in other applications and certain KOffice plugins are
actually implemented as parts. (Whether that actually is necessary, I'm not
sure, I'm mainly thinking of the Krita extensions.)
>
>
> I appreciate your time with this. I would not ask these if I would
> have found answers elsewhere. So thanks in advance.

Thanks for your interest!

--
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org
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On Thursday 21. May 2009 00.20.07 Richard Georg Bayer wrote:
> 1) The most general: What are the ways of driving KOffice's actions
> from the outside? 1.1) I mean can KOffice be used as a tool through
> it's API to build up documents? 1.2) And other ways?

Yes it is, see for examples;
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KWord_Scripting

--
Thomas Zander


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[dotancohen]

> Yes it is, see for examples;
> http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KWord_Scripting
>

Can this be used, for example, to convert HTML files to PDF via the
CLI? I am not a programmer and am having a hard time with that page.

--
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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On Thursday 21 May 2009, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > Yes it is, see for examples;
> > http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KWord_Scripting
>
> Can this be used, for example, to convert HTML files to PDF via the
> CLI? I am not a programmer and am having a hard time with that page.

For that, it's easier to use the koconverter commandline application:

koconverter bla.html bla.pdf

but, in this particular case we've got a problem: pdf is a print format,
not a file export format in KOffice, so this particular example doesn't work
:-(

--
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org
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On Thursday 21. May 2009 10.14.49 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > Yes it is, see for examples;
> > http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KWord_Scripting
>
> Can this be used, for example, to convert HTML files to PDF via the
> CLI? I am not a programmer and am having a hard time with that page.

If you type
        kword --help-koffice
you'll note some new features that were introduced for 2.1 that allow you to
print to a PDF directly without any user input.

  --export-pdf              Only export to PDF and exit
  --export-filename <filename> Filename for export-pdf

Unfortunately 2.1 is still some time off so a little patience is needed.
--
Thomas Zander


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[dotancohen]

> For that, it's easier to use the koconverter commandline application:
>
> koconverter bla.html bla.pdf
>

Thanks. Doing that from the CLI gave this output:
$ koconverter calendar.html calendar.pdf
koconverter(4338): "*** The conversion failed! ***"

And popped up (wtf?!?) a dialog box:
"Could not export file"

> but, in this particular case we've got a problem: pdf is a print format,
> not a file export format in KOffice, so this particular example doesn't work
> :-(
>

If Kword 2.0 RC it does seem that PDF is an export option!

--
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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[dotancohen]

> If you type
>        kword --help-koffice
> you'll note some new features that were introduced for 2.1 that allow you to
> print to a PDF directly without any user input.
>
>  --export-pdf              Only export to PDF and exit
>  --export-filename <filename> Filename for export-pdf
>
> Unfortunately 2.1 is still some time off so a little patience is needed.

I see, thanks. Any suggestions for the time being, something
scriptable (I am using it in a simple script).

Thanks!

--
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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