xberg-libwpd

WordPerfect (.wpd, .wp5, .wp6, and the wider WordPerfect binary family from WP 4.2 through the X-series) text extraction for Xberg, backed by libwpd and its document-model dependency librevenge.

How it works

libwpd exposes no extract() call. It drives librevenge's SAX-like RVNGTextInterface: the caller supplies a concrete implementation and libwpd invokes its callbacks. A hand-written C++ shim (src/shim.cpp) implements that interface, accumulates a text (or, via extract_markdown, lightly Markdown-marked-up) rendering, and exposes a small flat C API. src/lib.rs wraps it in a safe Rust surface:

let text = xberg_libwpd::extract_text(&bytes)?;
let markdown = xberg_libwpd::extract_markdown(&bytes)?; // headings, bold/italic, lists
let ok = xberg_libwpd::is_supported(&bytes);

Footnotes, endnotes, comments, text boxes, headers and footers are never concatenated straight into the surrounding narrative text: each is collected separately and spliced back in behind a [kind: ...] marker (headers/footers, which recur on every page rather than at one point in the document, are exposed once at the start/end instead). Tables stay tab/newline-separated in both modes — WordPerfect tables can have ragged rows and merged cells that don't map cleanly onto Markdown's fixed-column pipe-table syntax.

Building

build.rs downloads the librevenge and libwpd release tarballs (checksum verified) and compiles them from source together with the shim into one static library, using the C++ toolchain via the cc crate. Both libraries are built against their MPL-2.0 arm.

Downloaded sources are cached in a workspace-relative directory (derived from OUT_DIR) so they survive cargo clean, mirroring xberg-tesseract. Override the location with XBERG_LIBWPD_CACHE_DIR.

Requirements

A C++17 compiler.
boost headers. librevenge and libwpd both use header-only boost::spirit at build time. Install boost (brew install boost, apt-get install libboost-dev, or on Windows vcpkg install boost-spirit:x64-windows-static-md boost-serialization:x64-windows-static-md) or point BOOST_INCLUDE_DIR at a directory containing boost/version.hpp.
zlib (librevenge's zip stream links against it) — system zlib on Linux/macOS, or vcpkg install zlib:x64-windows-static-md on Windows (resolved via VCPKG_ROOT/VCPKG_INSTALLATION_ROOT, matching the x64-windows-static-md triplet this workspace's CI already uses for libheif).

Platform support

Desktop only: Linux (glibc and musl), macOS, and Windows (MSVC). On any other target the crate compiles to stub functions that return WpdError::UnsupportedPlatform, so wasm/android builds pull in no C++ toolchain.

Licensing