Using OpenDocument as another Native output format

FCKEditor has the best UI for web editing, and is very popular.
It could become the missing component to build a web-based document management solution if it will be able to store its outputs in the OpenDocument standard, in addition to the XHTML standard.
That way, with all the tools available on the OpenDocument standard (http://opendocumentfellowship.com/applications), it would be very easy to build server-side solutions which generate files which could be opened by the OpenDocument Text (.odt) compliant applications (OpenOffice.org, KOffice, ...), by MS Word (jodconverter can easily create a .doc from OpenDocument), but also PDF files and so on.
At the same time, those document management solutions could be fully text-searchable, etc...

Is anyone interested by such a feature ?

Note : Since I will very soon design a new solution, I also created a new feature request (https://dev.fckeditor.net/ticket/2818) to ask for this development in FCKeditor 2.6.5.

Sat, 01/24/2009 - 15:25

fredck

Joined: 19/01/2007

Posts: 898

Re: Using OpenDocument as another Native output format

While I think we would not be working on such a feature that soon, I think this is a nice thing to have. Actually, V3 makes it possible to ouput the document in different formats. It's just a matter of writing a plugin to do that.

While a plugin can output data in Open Document format, the hard task here is the opposite, handling data input. This is hard because the plugin must be able to handle the entire Open Document specification, while in the output we are talking about a small part of it. For example, you could have used OpenOffice to draw inside a document, but then, when opening that same document in CKEditor, you would not be able to handle such thing.

So, if you think supporting a subset of the Open Document specification, this is definitely doable. You just need to get your hands dirty with code now.

Frederico Knabben
CKEditor Project Lead and CKSource Owner
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Sun, 01/25/2009 - 17:18

osarrat

Joined: 24/01/2009

Posts: 2

Re: Using OpenDocument as another Native output format

The discussion we're all having make me consider how much it would be a complex task to develop an editor which could do all the document editing tasks available in Open Document Format, and in the end, it is not really what I'm looking for.

So, I think that for my project I will just limit the editing possibilities of FCKeditor to small subset of features, and then perform a XHTML->ODT XSLT transformation on the server-side. I will check with my future users what they really need, and limit the web-editing to that.

Anyway, thanks for the development of FCKeditor, we use for two years in our humanitarian projects quality management software, and it's doing a great job!

Tue, 02/24/2009 - 18:45

asdfgh

Joined: 24/02/2009

Posts: 3

Re: Using OpenDocument as another Native output format

So, I think that for my project I will just limit the editing possibilities of FCKeditor to small subset of features, and then perform a XHTML->ODT XSLT transformation on the server-side.

I've been searching for a solution to do this xhtml->odt conversion but I didn't find anyhing. How can you do that?