CF9 Wishlist Addition: CFDocument type="WordDoc|RTF"
Dear Adobe ColdFusion Development Team,
I have an addition to my "CF9 Wishlist"...
Like most of us, I have to update my resume now and then. Being a coder by nature, I prefer building it in HTML. However, those pesky IT Recruiters always "need" to have it in "Word format". Despite my sending over an .html file and telling the folks "this will open just fine in Word, just click the File menu and press Open, trust me", I still get a fair amount of folks writing back, asking for a .DOC file. So I'm forced to either a) maintain 2 separate versions of my resume (.html and .doc) or b) do the "save as .DOC" conversion myself, then deal with all the margins and other auto-magic that MS Office screws up when doing said conversion (note: now that I'm on OpenOffice, it's not quite as crazy, but still more re-work than I really care to deal with).
So how about we add a 'format="WordDoc"' to the cfdocument tag?
I can already auto-generate .pdf and FlashPaper, which is great. And PDFs are good enough for SOME of those IT Recruiter folks, but it would really save us a lot of re-work if we could auto-genereate a Word file as well.
Or maybe (for the sake of slightly more cross-platform use) do a "format='RichTextFormat'"? I'll take either .DOC or .RTF files, which ever you guys can code up first. :)
Thanks, Nolan
<CFDOCUMENT> is one of those tags that didn't get a great deal of love in the CF8 release. I hope they come back to it. Under the covers they could (I imagine) create a range of text-based transforms using XSLT. So <CFDOCUMENT format="xslx"> really does an XSLT transformation of the generated output of the tag. Even better, we could then write
<CFDOCUMENT format="xslttext" scriptsrc="HTMLtoMyObscureMarkup.xslt" />
Out of the box, Adobe could then supply, say 5-8 xslts for word, excel, open office writer, etc.
Capturing the mechanics of the transformation in an XSLT template would ideally allow the community to their own transforms, and allow Adobe to contribute more between releases.
Of course XSL forms really didn't take off, despite the fact they did offer quite a bit of power and flexibility. And it is a bit of a risk relying on the CF community to do anything (although I think we are getting better).
Cheers