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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Abiword/KWord cooperation
From:       David Faure <david () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2000-04-18 14:07:51
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Hi, thanks for contacting us about this ! This is definitely a good idea.
I am not directly involved with writing filters (well, I am but only for
KSpread's currently) - but I wanted to raise the following issue.

According to the AbiWord DTD, AbiWord saves a document as a flat XML file.
KOffice applications, however, save document in a tar.gz file, which
contains a maindoc.xml, the main document, and possibly the images in
their native format, the embedded parts from other KOffice applications,
etc. So writing a filter that can read e.g. a KWord document is 
going to involve either a tar xvf from the user - good starting point,
but not very user friendly - or that AbiWord can read/write tar.gzs.
To help in this area, there is libtar 
at http://www-wsg.cso.uiuc.edu/resources/libtar/
but I haven't looked into it, and there is some simple source code for
that in KDE (kdelibs/kio/ktar.*) - simple because as opposed to tar
and libtar, it doesn't support updating and removing from an archive,
but only writing the full file at once - which is exactly what KOffice
application, or any KOffice filter, needs.
IIRC AbiWord is written in c, but it shouldn't be a problem for it to
use ktar after a quick port to c (no fancy c++ features there).

Once the tar problem is solved, the next step is writing filters
between the two DTDs. You can find KWord's DTD at
http://www.nebsllc.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/koffice/kword/dtd/
and click on the version number besides kword.dtd.

I hope you will soon get an answer from the MSWord filter developer.

David.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 03:03:54PM +0200, Joaquín Cuenca Abela wrote:
> Hi, I'm an Abiword developer, and I was thinking that Abiword and Kword
> can cooperate in some areas, specially with the filters.
> 
> We have a word 6/7 (95)/8 (97)/9 (2000) import filter (James Montgomerie
> has started to work in the export capacities recently) that maybe we can
> share.  It's in a separate module (wv) of the cvs tree.  The word import
> filter is the same one that can be found in mswordview.
> 
> It would be nice, too, if we add read/write support to our respective
> formats.  We have the Abiword DTD at
> <http://bur-jud-118-039.rh.uchicago.edu/abiword/abiword.dtd> (you can
> find some test files in the abiword source tree).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Joaquín Cuenca Abela
> e-mail: cuenca@ie2.u-psud.fr

-- 
David FAURE
david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://home.clara.net/faure/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today

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