Subject: Re: StarOffice import, first thought
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Feb 11 2001 - 23:13:27 CST
Hi everyone,
I would like to address a few issues in this thread, and maybe provide a
road-map for handling this.
> > The problem is that this implementation will require adding OLE as a
> > module of AbiWord, not only of wv. It will require also to implement
> > the StarOffice metafile, available elsewhere
> > (http://www.openoffice.org/source/browse/graphics/), because it is
> > used by graphics.
Yes, handling this would require making an OLE library available to AbiWord
as a whole. libole2 would do nicely here, but I'm not entirely convinced
that supporting OLE2 SO documents is really necessary. Supporting the new OO
XML documents would be nice, esp. if we can do this better than they can.
>This solution wouldn't bloat AbiWord, and would also mean that we'd be able
>to use libole2 from the Abi code (and it might make it easier to upgrade
>libole2).
Considering that I'm the only person in the world working on libole2 and
effectively its maintainer (ok, michael meeks is but still...), no it
wouldn't :-)
So IMHO it'd be great if someone read through parts of the 300 Page
OpenOffice XML spec. Not all of it pertains to the StarWriter product, or
its file format. Creating an importer should be pretty doable by extending
the XML importer class, and it'd definitely show up on Sun's radar screen.
An exporter would probably not be too difficlt.
I'd be more than happy to do at least some initial work on this if someone
out there has OO installed on their computer and would send me a few test
files to play with and maybe a few screen dumps or output PS files. *Someone
please do this for me*
And their DTDs are relatively stable right now, so we shouldn't be too
worried about targeting a moving spec. Hell, the MSWord format changes a lot
more often :-)
Dom
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