Introduction¶
What ulif.openoffice is¶
ulif.openoffice is a Python package to support document transformations using OpenOffice.org (OOo).
It provides components to ask a running OOo-server for document conversions from office-type documents like .doc or .odt to HTML or PDF. Using ulif.openoffice you can trigger such conversions via commandline or via a Python-API that works also with Python versions without any PyUNO support.
Furthermore, it provides a caching server that caches all documents once converted and delivers them in case a document is requested again. Depending on your needs this can speed-up things by factor 10 or more.
Sources¶
ulif.openoffice is hosted on:
where you can get latest released versions.
The subversion repository of the sources is:
Requirements¶
ulif.openoffice requires some PyUNO-capable Python somewhere to do the actual conversions. It also provides a client-API for Python code that does not provide that support. Current Debian-based distributions normally offer a package for PyUNO support.
ulif.openoffice is tested on Debian-based systems, most notably Ubuntu, and won’t work on Windows.
The package is designed for server-based deployments. While the OOo-server is running, you cannot use the office-suite on your desktop (at least at time of writing this). This is a limitation of OOo itself.
Overview¶
ulif.openoffice mainly provides three different components:
An oooctl server that runs in background, starts a local OOo-server and monitors its status. If the OOo server process dies, it is restarted by oooctl.
A pyunoserver, which is a TCP-server that implements an own protocol to listen for conversion requests. When a valid request arrives, it tries to contact a local OOo server to do the conversion.
The pyunoserver also runs a cache manager that caches already converted documents and delivers them in case the conversioned version already exists.
This component needs access to the PyUNO library.
A client library to talk to the PyUNO server. This component does not require PyUNO.
The three components play together roughly as shown in the following figure:
Fig. 1: Overview of ulif.openoffice components
The blue lines show the way from a source document (in .doc format) to the OpenOffice.org server while the red lines show the way back of the converted document (PDF).
Use of client-API, oooctl server and cache is optional.
All this currently happens on the same machine. There are plans for support of multi-machine scenarios with distributed servers and load-balancing features.