Re: viewing docx files

[Jude DaShiell]

I wonder if the file utility can tell the difference between a docx-utf-8 
file and a docx-non-utf-8 file.  If that can work it may be possible to do 
a little docx inspection to find when to trigger the unzip->iconv->zip 
process and only trigger that process when necessary. On Sun, 29 Jan 2017, 
Joost Kremers wrote:

> Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2017 17:51:00
> From: Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>
> To: Tomas Nordin <tomasn@posteo.net>
> Cc: Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater@gmail.com>, help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: viewing docx files
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 29 2017, Tomas Nordin wrote:
> > Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> > > Hi all. I'm running Gnu-Emacs (latest brew install emacs version) on MacOS 
> > > Sierra. I run Emacs in the terminal, and use the Emacspeak package for 
> > > access, since I am blind. I received an email (gnews), with an attachment, 
> > > two docx files for reading. I was able to download the attachments to my 
> > > ~/ directory. I opened the file (c-x c-f then tab completion), but it 
> > > opened 
> >
> > I wonder if you would like to eval and try this:
> >
> > (defun docx2html (file)
> >   "Convert FILE to html in a buffer and display it."
> >   (interactive "f")
> >   (let ((html-buffer (format "*%s --> html*" file)))
> >     (call-process "pandoc" file html-buffer nil "--to=html")
> >     (switch-to-buffer html-buffer))
> >   )
> >
> > After evaluation, say M-x docx2html and locate the docx file. See if it
> > works. It did not work for me but it seems to have to do with the
> > encoding of the characters in the test files I have. I mean, it works
> > such that I get the following message from pandoc in the new buffer:
> >
> >     pandoc: Cannot decode byte '\xb1': 
> > Data.Text.Encoding.Fusion.streamUtf8: Invalid UTF-8 stream
>
> Pandoc only reads and writes UTF-8 and does no conversion. So if the files 
> you want to convert & view are in another encoding, you'll need to reencode 
> them first. Not sure if there's a tool to do that for docx files, though. 
> iconv can convert text files from one encoding to another, but for that to 
> work on docx files, you'll need to unzip them first (and zip them up again 
> afterwards).

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