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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: invited by abiword to work together on doc import
From:       "Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod () hotmail ! com>
Date:       2001-05-24 0:52:49
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Hi Shadeed,

Well, I was really talking about collaboration on DOC export in my post to 
KDE's notices page, but I'd also like to maybe work together toward better 
doc import too, which is something that the two of us can definitely do.

Ideally, our two teams could use some shared library in C or C++ to handle 
doc import, OLE, etc... wvWare attempts to be this, but it's admittedly not 
the greatest code on the planet. That said, wvWare works pretty darned well.

I'd maybe want to start on a wvWare2 or something like that - we'd create 
some C++ classes and routines for reading and parsing DOC. I'll have to take 
a look at your strategy used in KWord.

We could also work on something like this for exporting to DOC. I have a 
really trivial API for doing this in wvWare. It's missing lots, but at least 
it's well-documented :-)

>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.

Yeah, I wish that I'd known about this earlier or maybe you'd sent me an 
email a few months ago.

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

Yup. We Gnomers have that too :-) Gnumeric's Excel export, for example, is 
tremendous.

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

Hehe - cheaters. We can do: 'mv foo.rtf foo.doc' too. The Abi team 
purposefully didn't do this. We want to do DOC export, and do it correctly.

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

Thanks :-)

I also have some addendums to the Word8 specification housed on your website 
(almost the same as mine, also "stolen" from MSDN). They basically relate to 
BiDirectional text properties in the PAP and CHP and some undocumented SPRM 
values. Abi can now handle BiDi textruns read in from DOC. If KWord can do 
BiDi text, you can add the same 3 trivial lines of code too :)

>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.

wvWare has a sister project - libwmf2. IIRC, KDE has 3 completely different 
WMF viewing applications. Maybe it'd be useful to standardize on one, or 
possibly create a 4th based on libwmf? ImageMagick uses libwmf. Maybe Gnome 
and Kde should too.

The Gnumeric excel filters are pretty damn good, so it might be useful if 
you could grab code from there. It's there for the stealing.

Thanks,
Dom, (lead AbiWord and wvWare guy, Gnome-Office lead)

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