Abstract

Research existing solutions for extracting text from proprietary Microsoft file formats.

Details

For moin2, we already have quite some converters (including Open Document Format [OpenOffice / LibreOffice]), but nothing for Microsoft Office formats. Now we need to create a survey of the GPL2+ license compatible code that can extract text from these proprietary file formats.

We need to know:

• is a license compatible to GPL2+ used?
  • for python libraries e.g.: GPL, BSD, MIT, ... (not: Apache License 2)
  • in general: a free software license, not any proprietary license
• the programming language used
  • strongly preferred is library code in python (we can just call it)
  • also maybe working is a commandline tool (supported platforms?) that we can call as a subprocess
• windows-only solutions are not wanted
• compatibility with different file formats (mainly Word but also Excel and Powerpoint)
• compatibility with different versions (i.e. .DOC and .DOCX)
• reliability (is it well-maintained code, is it recently updated?)

Deliverable: wiki page

Benefits

Many Moin users would like to have a platform-independant, pure python way to extract text for indexing.

Researching existing code base is a first step on this direction.

Skill Requirements

You'll need to do a lot of search on the Web. Discuss with moin devs online on IRC.

Links

This task refers to moin2 (http://moinmo.in/MoinMoin2.0)!

• http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/2.0 or http://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-2.0 - repository of moin2

• http://moimo.in/MoinMoinChat - please join us on IRC #moin-dev

You can discuss this issue in the MoinMoin wiki: http://moinmo.in/EasyToDo/TextExtractors