Content Transformation Service

The Content Transformation Service provides capabilities to apply transformations to files and content.

Transformers are plug-ins in charge of content transformation (e.g. word to pdf) using required library or tools. Transformers can be chained into Transformation Chains to implement complex transformation schemes (e.g. XML -> MSWord -> PDF or MSWord -> PDF -> Watermarked PDF).

Currently, this component offers the following major transformation engines:

• OpenOffice: convert files (supported by OpenOffice.org) to PDF, OpenDocument, OpenXML, Plain Text, or HTML
• Imaging Service: use Nuxeo’s Imaging Service for image format conversion, resize, crop, add watermark, add label, etc.
• PDFBox: convert PDF to pictures or text. Add a watermark to PDF.
• Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator: wide variety of formats to PDF and PDF to HTML, Plain Text, etc.
• Adobe LiveCycle Assembler: concatenate PDF, add watermark, etc.

Transformation can be triggered manually, by the user, or automatically by rules reacting on events (e.g. file modification). For example, you can easily configure the system to transform all files to PDF when a document is approved or published.

To simplify usage, it is possible to call a transformation of format specifying only desired output format. The service will try guessing the input file format and finding the best transformation path to output the required format. This considerably eases automatic format conversion because it is often not possible to know what file format a user will attach to a document. Given this feature, the system will simply find the best way to output the required format from the input file.