HTML preview for doc, docx, pdf & rtf | Hacker News Reader

HTML preview for doc, docx, pdf & rtf

recruiterbox.com

44 points_raghu15 comments

Prompted by downloading a .doc file from Qwest only to find out that inside was a monospaced text file, I set up a small, nearly UI-free site for doing document conversions. http://doc.mar.cx/<url>; gives an HTML or other sensible rendering of an url (e.g. http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/02/02... ) and http://doc.mar.cx/<extension>/<url>; attempts to convert the url into the format with the given extension (e.g. http://doc.mar.cx/txt/http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/0... ).

I use wvHtml for doc->html, wvPDF for doc->pdf, but antiword for doc->txt. To convert .docx, .xls, .xlsx, and WordPerfect files to HTML, I use OpenOffice, by way of jodconverter. For ODF files, I use OdfConverter. Conversion of Excel files to .csv files uses xls2csv. For PowerPoint files, I use ppthtml to convert to html, and catppt to convert to text. For Lotus 1-2-3 files (I added this after downloading some historical telecom data from the FCC!), I use ssconvert.

Any conversion that results in an HTML file (e.g. doc or pdf to html) I bundle all the images into a single file using the data: url scheme. To do this, I wrote a utility called pagecan: http://afiler.com/pagecan/

UX Suggestion: Please hyperlink the Blog text besides the Recruiterbox logo. It's underlined so users expect it to be a link.

Also, a <title> tag would be useful :-).

But apart from this, I now I'll face this very problem soon (well, for a relatively fluctuant value of "soon"), so thank you very much for sharing this _raghu!

Thanks, yeah will do this :)

You should also consider 'pandoc', written in Haskell, for converting between markup formats: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

I am curious for more details about why Tika wasn't good enough. Please explain.

Tika is very good at converting documents to plain text. Very reliable too. The problem for us was that, most resumes have a lot of formatting in them. For example candidates use tables to structure data. When such a resume is converted to plain text using tika, it looks jumbled.

Will take a look at pandoc. Thanks for suggesting.

Based on the title I expected some html5 magic for converting binary files into html in the browser.

How about trying out calibre http://calibre-ebook.com It can do all kinds of conversions from a number of formats, it is quite reliable, and it can be run headless.

How would you compare abiword for doc/docx conversion versus antiword (http://www.winfield.demon.nl/)?

Also, what are the limitations of abiword for doc/docx files?

Haven't tried antiword. As of now I find abiword pretty stable for both doc and docx. I need more data but I found a few cases where it just hanged while converting. There is no specific pattern to when the program hangs. For now I am logging such cases and timing out the conversion in 3 seconds.

Thanks.

Where do you get your doc files?

Are they the just ones submitted to your site, or is there a pastebin or similar repo of doc files?

Million Dollar Question:

How could you additionally parse the information to extract structured data? For example; names of candidates, addresses, previous employers, job titles held.

That's been done across online job boards since 1996 when we launched hotjobs. Resumes, although varying aesthetically contain a pretty ridged structure that presents itself well to localized extraction. This allows easy term extraction for searching across a very large data set quickly.

A simple 30 line flex/yacc combo will work effectively at a high ninety percentile

Please add a candidate delete function. I sent an email with candidate with multiple attachments and Recruiterbox created multiple candidates by mistake.

There's really not much here.

Could we see some code or a demo?

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