Doctool

A tool to manipulate .docx files, which enables to

• remove the ennoying "protection" that blocks some features (e.g. to restrict the formatting)
• list all the contributors of track changes
• rename those authors (e.g. for correcting a mistake or achieve consistent and homogeneous naming policy. Thanks to Alexandre Marquet for the original tips)
• make the document smaller by converting embedded EMF and PNG pictures to SVG or JPG (lossy ! Please check the output document !)

Usage

This is for the moment a command-line tool. It should work on every computer with Python (this was tested on Linux (Manjaro), and on Windows with the Anaconda Python distribution)

• python doctool.py example.docx removeprotection : remove the "protection" of the document (e.g. in order to add new formatting or styles).
• python doctool.py example.docx list_authors : returns the list of authors in the track changes
• python doctool.py example.docx change_authors "old1" "new1" "old2" "new2"... : change authors names (from old to new. N.B. Don't forget to have quotation marks if a name include spaces). You may append -o output_file.docx in order to preserve the original file. Beware: changing several author names to a common one is not properly tested (behavior is unknown e.g. when several track changes from several authors overlap/conflict those authors are all renamed to a common one...)
• python doctool.py example.docx slimfast [-o output.docx] : Reduces the size of the .docx file by converting embedded images : PNG are converted to JPG if the JPG is < 66% the original size, and EMF are converted first to SVG (using libemf2svg which seems to produce good quality results. Only compiled and tested on Linux at the moment). Embedding SVG directly within the docx requires additional changes to document.xml compared to other file types so for the moment it is rasterized as PNG or JPG. Of course all of this are lossy changes => use it at your own risk and check the result !