DESCRIPTION

A server for converting docs from other formats to OOo, generating pdf
files, , getting and setting metadata. To be used together with ERP5
system for generating reports and converting documents for DMS, although
can be run standalone for any other client application.

It returns a file in a desired format; html files are zipped because
they often consist of more than one file.

Tested using Python 2.4 and the following versions of OpenOffice:
    2.0.3-7
    2.1.0-6

A combination of Python 2.5 and OpenOffice 2.1 does NOT work because of
incompatibility of pyuno.

A combination of Python 2.5 and OpenOffice 2.2 should work, but is not
fully tested yet.

INSTALLATION AND SETUP

Refer to http://wiki.erp5.org/HowToUseOood for most up-to-date
instruction about setting up the environment and installing oood.

If you install from source, remember to create a writable tmp directory
under your oood base dir.

Setup is done in oood.conf. Important parts are:

- server_host, server_port

- paths to programs

- instance_load_time - how long it takes for your machine to load an OOo
  instance; this is important because when it is restarted, a script
  spawns a new instance and then has to wait before trying to connect,
  and also because if another instance is started too soon (before the
  previous one loads completely) they are both merged into one.

- instance_timeout - when an OOo instance we called does not return for
  too long, we decide it has crashed; we kill it and start another one.
  This is the time after which we undertake this drastic action.

- file formats which you want to use, or which you want to hide; it
  doesn't affect the abilities of oood, only limits the list of allwed
  conversion target formats, which is rather long and contains many
  formats you may never need

USAGE

Refer to the /samples directory for examples of client usage in various
programming languages:

- Python
- PHP
- Java
- C++



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