5.5 File Conversions
20220305
Converting from one file format to another is a complex yet common task. Here we collect together a variety of conversion tasks and the tools to perform them.
We can often use pandoc for much of the hard work. File types supported include docx, md, org, pdf, rst, tex, though some, like docx are only supported for output.
pandoc mydoc.tex -o mydoc.md # LaTeX to Markdown
pandoc mydoc.md -o mydoc.docx # Markdown to Microsoft Word
To convert Microsoft and LibreOffice documents to pdf, as also covered in Section 96.5, we can use libreoffice itself, invoked in headless mode from the command line:
libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf input.docx # Microosft Word to PDF
libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf input.xlsx # Microsoft Excel to PDF
Jupyter notebook conversions are provided by jupyter-nbconvert:
jupyter-nbconvert --to markdown doc.ipynd --stdout > doc.md
jupyter-nbconvert --to python doc.ipynd --stdout > doc.py
jupyter-nbconvert --to python doc.ipynd --stdout > doc.R
Another type of conversion results from MS/Windows using a different line ending convention for text files to GNU/Linux (and Unix). Originally dos2unix was used for this task which is now accomplished by flip which will convert the file in-place:
Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0