Re: abiword --help

Dominic Lachowicz wrote:

>> I think that abiword --to-png or --thumb does not work from command line
>> because it need a DISPLAY device. When I set Xvfb as a default display
>> device, abiword --to-png started behaving differently, instead of giving
>> some error it now just hangs.
>>
>> I wonder if anyone was able to create document preview pngs with abiword
>> on a server that does not have a display?
>
>
> --to-png is no longer supported in AbiWord 2.5. It never did what
> people thought it would anyway. It would convert any image format to
> PNG on the command-line. It would not convert a document to a PNG.
> Basically, it was a *really really* dumb version of ImageMagick's
> convert program.
>
> In AbiWord 2.5, you don't need a display to convert a document to PS
> or PDF (or any other format). From there, you can use ghostscript,
> ImageMagick, or poppler to produce a preview image of the document.
> I'd suggest writing a small program using Poppler's C API that does
> exactly that. It would:
>
> 1) Use AbiWord to convert the document to PDF
> 2) Use poppler + a cairo image surface to load and render the first
> page of that PDF
> 3) Save that cairo image surface to a PNG on disk
>
> Should be < 50 lines of C code.
>
> Best,
> Dom

Sounds interesting. So, the --thumb= command also does not work with 2.5.1?

I don't have any experience with popple or cairo. I did have them both
installed because abiword required them.

Do you think I can somehow use netpbm utilities to create a thumbnail?

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Received on Fri Mar 23 20:25:32 2007