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List:       koffice
Subject:    file format
From:       admar () luon ! net
Date:       2000-10-14 22:14:37
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Hello,

I will first give a slight introduction of my self: I'm Admar Schoonen, a 20 
year young student Electrotechnology from Holland, and I am very interested in 
KOffice and OpenOffice. I've joined the discussion mailinglist at 
openoffice.org, and I hope to do some little coding at that project. 
Meanwhile, the discussion on that list was (among other things) about the 
default file format. There is already consensus on the list that "it should be 
XML", but there is not yet any consensus about what to do with binary stuff 
like images. (Some suggested a package, like a tar or jar file that contain the 
XML data, others suggested MIME-encoding of the binary object inside the XML 
file.) I remembered that KOffice already uses XML as default file format, and 
thus I've read the KOffice FAQ (version 0.9.0).
It's said there (sections 5.3/5.4), that KOffice uses a tar-package to store
the binary objects and the XML-files, but the faq still leaves me a few 
questions:
  * Is there any kind of compression of the package?
    * If so, what kind of compression (gzip, bzip2, ...)?
    * When/how is the compression applied (on the individual XML-files only, on
      all files, before or after creating the tar-ball)?
  * Is there any kind of security in the package?
    * If so, what kind of security?
    * When/how is security applied (inside several sections of the XML-files
     (per-section coding), on the individual files, before or after the
     tar-ball)?
  * What were the main reasons to choose for a package, and why is tar choosen
    as package-format?
  * Is there anything special about the tar-package (eg: does it have some sort 
    of index-file, like jar does)?
  * Are there any tools provided with KOffice to extract the XML-files from the
    package?
  * Is there an option in KOffice to not save as a package, but to save to a
    "pure" XML-file with the (encoded) binary objects inside the XML-file?
	* If not, why?
    * If so, how are the binary objects encoded and is there anything special
      about the generated XML-file (like an index at the beginning, or all
      binary objects at the end)? Is it also possible to update the text in the
	  XML-file, without saving the (large) binairy objects again (the
	  partial-update)?
      * If so, how did you realize that and what are the implications of that
        for the XML-file?
  * Are there mailinglist archives that I (and others of openoffice) could read,
    about this (and other) subjects?

The last question: do you mind if your reply gets posted to
discuss@openoffice.org?

(I hereby apologise for asking some questions, which could simply be answered by
installing and running KOffice; I'm using Debian Woody, and I did install
KOffice, but it wouldn't run (some error about "could not connect to socket").
Unfortunately, I don't have time yet to get the latest source and compile my
self, so I'm bothering you with the questions.)

Thank you for your reply, and I'm hoping both projects (OpenOffice and KOffice)
can learn from each other (and perhaps share code).
And if this address (koffice@kde.org) is a mailing list, please cc to me, since
I'm not on the list. Thank you.

-- 
Admar Schoonen                            E-mail: admar@luon.net
Student Electrotechnology at Eindhoven, University of Technology

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