Hi, There was a koffice file format discussion lately and I did not like it because everybody argued but nobody wanted to code. However, I studied the tar file format and I understand it now. I have code which can write tar files and compress them a la gzip. Reading code is almost finished. I only need libz in kdesupport now and then the file format will be a gzip compressed tar file. Amen :-) Bye Torben