On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Durval Menezes wrote:

Here's my submission for a new package: catdoc, a nice Word/Excel/Powerpoint -> plaintext conversion utility.

The URL to the SRPM is: http://www.durval.com.br/RPMS/el4/catdoc/catdoc-0.94.2-2dm.el4.src.rpm

I've attached the .spec file.

When we built catdoc for SL3x I found that there was a problem parsing *some* XLS files -- it incorrectly guessed that some things were using 2-byte lengths then treated the next byte as a charset descriptor and ends up thinking it is using multi-byte chars, and wanders off the end of the data. The code to 'guess' the header data format is really quite ugly.

[ incidentally at least some versions of gnumeric seem to have a very similar issue, maybe that code is from a common source... ]

I applied a small patch which seems to work for us, though I got no reply from the author when I offered it.

We also added a patch make xls2csv quote even *null* values which solved a problem for us (though that is probably not what everyone wants...)

Our rpm also installs wordview by a different name to avoid a clash with another app of the same name (:-), but the srpm might (just) be worth glancing at:

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jp107/sl3x-updates/SRPMS/catdoc-0.94.2-2.JSP...

If you want I can possibly arrange to provide a .XLS file which upsets catdoc (all my existing examples contain personal-data so I'd have to get one made specially -- the ones which cause problems have been e-mailed to us from another site).

On 7/25/06, Durval Menezes durval@tmp.com.br wrote:

Hello,

Here's my submission for a new package: catdoc, a nice Word/Excel/Powerpoint -> plaintext conversion utility.

Seems Dag beat me to it, but there are a couple unwritten requires for packages submitted for centosplus or extras. They should not exist in either dag's (rpmforge) repository, or in the Extras rebuild provided by centos.karan.org. They should not rely on a 3rd party repository for dependent packages. They should be from an active/established project; unless there's an overwhelming demand for something, I won't put brand new code from an unknown project in.. doesn't meet the enterprise definition.

All the previous negative things and rules aside, thanks for your submission. Action is appreciated and welcomed, but this is already packaged by dag.