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Awesome. How do you guys convert binary DOC/PPT files to files you can work with? If I remember correctly, the only way to do it was to convert it on a Windows system.

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(doc,ppt)->pdf->flash ?

OpenOffice, perhaps?

Or this? http://poi.apache.org/

I hope not. In a quest for Linux-usable tools for manipulating Word docs I gave POI a shot, and with even moderately complex documents the results were horrible.

Running Word on an EC2 instance of Windows Server looked to be my best option. :(

I suspected as much. Microsoft seems to have started from the GUI and worked their way down to an API.

The Word API is really quite handy, and scripting it using Ruby (for example) is easy and effective. On win32.

Reading their binary format, though, is another matter.

Yeah, but it: (a) requires paid licenses, and (b) runs on a troublesome OS. It's also an absurd waste of time and resources just to convert a text format. I'd just as soon run it through Google Docs and scrape the result, etc.

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