.docx [LWN.net]

.docx

Posted May 30, 2008 10:00 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386)
In reply to: Is OpenOffice.org getting faster? by pr1268
Parent article: Is OpenOffice.org getting faster?

The beauty of .docx files is that only newer MSOffice can create them, so there are lots of
people who can't open them, not only the weird Linux people. And the Word version able to
create .docx can also export to pdf (finally. It's the only thing I use OO for, when Antiword
fails, and opening spreadsheets), so if you get a .docx you can just ask for the pdf version.

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.docx

Posted May 30, 2008 10:33 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

The new Office2007 formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are just .zip files in drag.
Change the extension and unpack for copious .xml.

.docx

Posted May 30, 2008 12:27 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

Just like ODF you mean?

Don't know about you, but I don't read XML, it's unreadable.

Did you actually tried doing it? I did, and no need to rename the thing, just unzipping it
works. But as expected it gives a unreadable big pile of steamy mess.

.docx

Posted May 31, 2008 7:04 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

This will make some sense of an ODF document:

#!/bin/sh
unzip -p "$1" content.xml \
| sed -e 's/<\/text:p>/\n/g' -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'

.docx

Posted Jun 4, 2008 12:57 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

Cool, thanks, it sort of works (mostly whitespace damage, but the text is readable).

.docx

Posted May 30, 2008 13:07 UTC (Fri) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

Microsoft provides a nice downconverter pack which allows you to open docx/xlsx/pptx files in
Office 2003/2000 (not tried '97 though).
While OpenSource/FreeSoftware developers have to read huge specs and do reverse engineering to
implement that all.