Art of Solving

This is a piece of non-news really. But in this period of controversies upon open source licenses (Ext JS, S2AP, etc.) you may be relieved to know that I have no intention whatsoever of switching to a more restrictive license for JODConverter and JODReports. And I am mentioning this because I did in fact recently receive a proposal that involved releasing JODConverter under a dual GPL/commercial licensing scheme in order to make some money out of it.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 has been released on March 27, so let's have a quick look at what it offers to JODConverter users.

To start with, the 2.4 release notes document is not just an ugly issue list taken directly from the tracker as with previous releases, but it is actually quite readable!

With release 2.2.1, and thanks to the contribution by Ingo Rockel, JODConverter now includes a Maven 2.0 plugin.

This means that you can now integrate document conversions directly into your project build process. For example, you could write some project documentation in OpenDocument format, and have it automatically converted to PDF and other formats for publication on your Maven-generated website.

Six months after JODConverter 2.2.0, here comes version 2.2.1. This is a maintenance release only, with no major new features. (Well there is one actually: the new Maven 2 plugin. But since it is not yet available in the Maven central repository, it will be officially announced separately in a few days' time.)

So let's see what has changed then.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 should be released in a week or so and I had a quick look at its release candidate 2.

Here are the new features that should be most interesting for JODConverter users

• Conversions to WikiMedia wiki format for word processor documents
• The bug in OOo 2.2/2.2.1 that caused stream-based conversions to fail with Word, Excel and other input formats has been fixed
• Headless mode on Unix/Linux no longer requires an X server (no need to use Xvfb any more!)

It's new! It's here! It's the best JODConverter release available.
The version number even matches the latest OpenOffice.org version, but that's pure coincidence.

New Features

• More flexibility in setting custom conversion options, including export options, import options, and macro execution flags.
• Preconfigured support for more formats: CSV and TSV (Comma-Separated and Tab-Separated Values); ODG (OpenDocument Drawing), also exportable to SVG.
• Command Line: you can now convert multiple files at once

  java -jar jodconverter-cli-2.2.0.jar -f pdf *.odt

  will convert all OpenDocument Text files in the current directory to PDF.

Linux.com has a short article by Dmitri Popov about JODConverter: Extending OpenOffice.org: Turning OpenOffice.org into a document conversion tool.

Great to see JODConverter's popularity grow!

Are you using JODConverter only as a command line tool? Would you like a simpler alternative that offers similar functionality? Possibly using a scripting language so it's more lightweight and also easier to customise?

PyODConverter is a 4.4kb Python script that does exactly that.

A new stable OpenOffice.org version has been released a few days ago (29 March).

I ran the JODConverter 2.1.1 test suite against the new OpenOffice.org 2.2 and as expected there are no incompatibilities - all tests are successful.

JODConverter 2.1.1 is now available for download from SourceForge.net.

The main focus for this release is... that the project name has changed! JOOConverter, for Java OpenOffice.org Converter, becomes JODConverter, for Java OpenDocument Converter.