How do I convert a word document to reStructured text?

[Martin Hans]

Hi,

Currently our product's user manual is written in Word, but we'd like to move all our documentation into Sphinx. Does anybody have an idea how I can do this at least partially automatically?

 

Thanks.

 

Martin

[Tim Golden]

(Sorry, very hurried reply). Have a look at this thread:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-August/504299.html

or look at things like antiword which dump out the text element
of Word. Possibly coupled with an html2rst module (which I believe
exist around).

TJG

[Christophe de VIENNE]

Another hurried answer :

I would try to convert to open document first using open office, then
use sxw2rest that is mentioned here :
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/links.html#import

My 2 cents,

Christophe

2008/10/28 Martin Hans <mh...@gmx.net>

[Bruce Eckel]

Well, I've just converted my Word book to Sphinx, and "partial automation" is the key. Actually, you can automate a lot of it but it's a cost-benefit analysis each time. For example, If I had a lot more headers it would have made sense to write a VBA Macro to put the Rest underlines on the headers, but I just did it by hand.

What I ended up doing is creating a build system that would take the word doc and convert it to ASCII, then do some post-processing (breaking it up into individual files, modifying the contents, etc.) But I kept it in Word and just continued to run the build until I was sure I had everything out that I wanted (and I jumped the gun on a few things like stripping out some of the indexing -- seemed like a good idea at the time but now I wish I hadn't). And finally I felt like I didn't need the word doc anymore and just started editing in Sphinx, but before that I did any edits in Word and ran the converter.

To get you started, here's the part that automatically writes the Word doc into an ASCII file:

if not os.path.exists("TIPython.txt") or os.path.getmtime("TIPython.doc") > os.path.getmtime("TIPython.txt"):

    import win32com.client

    import sys, os

    from win32com.client import constants # Run makepy (part of Pythonwin) if this doesn't work

    o = win32com.client.Dispatch("Word.Application")

    o.Visible = 0

    here = os.getcwd()

    o.Documents.Open(os.path.join(here, "TIPython.doc"))

    o.ActiveDocument.AcceptAllRevisions()

    o.ActiveDocument.SaveAs(FileName = os.path.join(here, "TIPython.txt"), FileFormat = constants.wdFormatText)

    o.ActiveDocument.Close()

    print "(TIPython.doc saved as TIPython.txt)"

--
Bruce Eckel

[Yarko T]

Bruce's approach sounds good.  There's also a python interface to Open Office.   PyUNO (some smaple scripts there too)

Regards,

Yarko

[Georg Brandl]

Yarko T schrieb:

> Bruce's approach sounds good. There's also a python interface to Open
> Office. PyUNO (some smaple scripts there too)

> <http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Python>

Though I've heard you must have quite a high pain resistance to use it :)

Georg