Often there are requests about DEVONthink being able to support other file formats. Personally I wonder about one thing: isn’t there a plugin API for such things? I think with a very simple interface a lot could be achieved.
Basically you could allow the plugin to define it’s interface with a small description file (XML or whatever is nice). In that interface it would define the following:
- Files it wants to be responsible for (by extension I’d suppose)
- Script to execute for importing that a matching file
- Output format (PDF, RTF, HTML, Text, CSV, maybe other formats that DEVONthink supports).
The script will accept the file to be converted on stdin (or it’s file name as a command line parameter), convert the input and print the converted document in the specified output format to standard out.
I believe that would give a lot more flexibility to DEVONthink and allow a lot more file types to be supported “natively” without the developers having to implement all of the formats that have been requestd (For example I’d like to see OpenOffice.org documents which I don’t think have been requested, yet).
Is there any chance we might see something like that?
Oh and I’ll be perfectly willing do create some proof-of-concept plugins. Actually for example antiword might be plugged into that architecture without any change.