A nifty trick for digital signage content creation

[Ric_]

Today I found myself with the task of putting a 'poster' onto the digital signage... not a problem I thought... until I discovered that the poster had lovingly been created in Word.

 

Obviously Word-processed documents were never intended to be dropped onto the system and I didn't really want to recreate the thing as another filetype (i.e. a picture).

 

The solution was to use some Linux trickery. I opened up the document in OpenOffice Writer and 'printed' the document to a postscript file. I was then able to open this in The Gimp, rotate through 90 degrees and scale it to suit the screen size before simply saving it as PNG.

 

It sounds really simple but it took a little lateral thinking before I reached this solution. There is probably a way to automate this too.

[localzuk]

You could have done all that in Windows...

[CyberNerd]

There is probably a way to automate this too.

 

 

I was thinking about doing something similar to this (bulk conversion to odt)

Openoffice is scriptable - Alfresco use it to convert doc,pdf etc. I found this howto script convert pdf http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/01/11/from-microsoft-to-openoffice.html

then probably imagemagick to rotate,resize and export as png

 

sure windows can do this - I'ts just more hassle installing everything and keeping it upto date, here we use windows for the windows only stuff and linux for everything else.