Article 1250 of cmu.cs.unix.announce:
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!spok
From: spok+@cs.cmu.edu (John Ockerbloom)
Newsgroups: cmu.cs.unix.announce,cmu.comp.infosystems.www
Subject: Conversions and other services on Web documents...
Date: 8 Dec 1995 17:28:46 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
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...can be found at http://tom.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/browse/objweb.
Enter a URL where you want to start browsing, and the Web documents
you view will be shown with an "interface bar" on top that allows
you to invoke conversions and other operations.  For example, you
can convert HTML to 80-column plain text, or Postscript to a GIF
sequence, or RTF to a set of HTML documents, or Acrobat 'PDF' files
to Postscript or GIFs, and so on.

If you'd rather convert from the shell, rather than from a Web browser,
the 'netconvert' utility is available on certain CS Unix platforms, and
can be built for others.  (There's a man page available on platforms
it's built on.)  This won't give you as much control as using
a specific converter directly would give you, but on the other hand,
you don't have to tell it more than what format you want to convert to.

The utilities aren't at 'production' quality (more like alpha or beta
quality). The user interface is a bit klunky.  (A certain degree of
this is unavoidable, since it's meant to work generically for any
document format, and be usable from any Web browser.)  Not all
features are fully implemented at this point (in particular, you can't
yet browse FTP directories or newsgroups, though you can pick out
individual FTP files or news articles).

But it's far enough along that it can be a useful tool for invoking
services that might not be easily runnable on your local machine.
More services, and better implementations of the services there, can
be added without much difficulty (as long as someone points me either
to a Sun implementation, or an implementation that can be invoked from
the Web somewhow).  New document types and formats can be added as
well, and definitions of current types and formats browsed.  Send
requests and bug reports to me.

John Mark Ockerbloom


