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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: invited by abiword to work together on doc import
From:       shaheed <srhaque () iee ! org>
Date:       2001-05-23 20:48:23
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On Wednesday 23 May 2001 20:32, Richard Bos wrote:
> Just to make sure, that this invention is not lost I'll post it here.
> The inventiotation was made after the beta2-release of koffice,
> see: http://dot.kde.org/990543337/
>
> Re: KOffice-1.1 Beta2 Released !
> by Dom Lachowicz on Wednesday May 23, @12:56AM

[snip]

> wvWare and Abi both have really good support for importing DOC. I'm trying
> to add support for exporting to DOC inside of wvWare right now, though. If
> anyone from the KWord development team is reading this and would like to
> collaborate on making something like this a reality, I'd really appreciate
> it. I'd hate to see a duplication of effort on this sort of scale when it
> could so easily be avoided.

Dom,

Thanks for your note. Before embarking on the KWord import filter, I put some 
serious effort into perusing the wvWare code. At the time, I was forced to 
conclude that I would be better off starting from scratch. I repeated the 
analysis process when StartOffice was opened up, with a similar result.

So, for the present, possibly the best that we can do on the import front is 
to steal each other's code as appropriate.

On the export side of things, I have not spent a whole lot of time thinking 
about this, except to note that in principle:

1. The techniques I used to bootstrap my import code (see 
http://www.btinternet.com/~shaheedhaque/) will help write out Word97. The 
biggest PITA is likely to be hacking the structures that are not 
auto-generated.

2. Writing out OLE files has been done (see 
http://www.koffice.org/filters/faq.phtml#toc59)

3. We already can write out RTF-and-rename-as-DOC, though this is obviouly 
not particularly flexible.

4. You guys seem to be well advanced oin this stuff...I do sporadically read 
your public forum!

It will certainly be worth evaluating this stuff if/when someone does this 
work for KOffice. If anyone else is thnking about this, I would certainly 
encourage cooperation too.

BTW: Similar comments apply to Excel, Powerpoint, MS Office drawing format, 
WMF/EMF.

Thanks, Shaheed ("lead MsWord filter developer")

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