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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Abiword/KWord cooperation
From:       Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca () ie2 ! u-psud ! fr>
Date:       2000-04-18 15:24:27
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David Faure wrote:
> 
> 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.

Yes, but it may change when I finish the bonobo support.  Anyways the
flat XML file will be supported, and it can be a good start point.

I have to add that some points of the DTD are not yet fixed (specially
the things that are not accesible by the GUI).  But, in general, the
actual DTD will remain stable.

> 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).

No problem here, Abiword is written in C++ (but without templates and
exceptions).

> 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.

Thank you for the link, I will take a look.  Do you have any example
file on the web? (my hard disk is *TOO* small, and I cann't download all
the stuff needed to run kword).

Cheers,

--
Joaquín Cuenca Abela
e-mail: cuenca@ie2.u-psud.fr

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