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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Library for MS Word filters (again)
From:       "Andrew C. Oliver" <acoliver () apache ! org>
Date:       2002-07-19 19:08:49
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["Re: Library for MS Word filters (again)" (message/rfc822)]

From - Thu Jul 18 16:08:09 2002
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Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 16:08:08 -0400
From: "Andrew C. Oliver" <acoliver@apache.org>
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To:  koffice-devel@mail.kde.org
Subject: RE: Library for MS Word filters (again)
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> This is as a follow-up to TJ's recent post in koffice, as I believe it's
> better to go to koffice-devel first. Feel free to cross-post.

TJ Brought this to my attention and so I've joined the list.  I'm the founder of 
the POI project.  You can read about me here: trilug.org/~acoliver.  

I don't use KDE, but I'm supportive of your efforts and will help any way I can
if you want to use POI.  

That being said, IANAL (though I do watch law and order on TV sometimes) 
and am not interested in discussing licensing, Stallman's philosophies or any
of the such, I'm a mere programmer and am only capable of helping in a technical 
capacity.  Should you require assistance with Licensing or other matters like that
please contact the Apache Software Foundation itself as they have people who understand
licenses and other plauges of humanity and law.

> Although T.J mentions wv2 and POI, I think we should not forget our
> _current_ MS Word filter. As Shaheed pointed out, it's already in a good
> shape and only needs improvements to make it someday on par with OO or at
> least Abiword's wv.

Cool, we'll take a look at it.  The POI::HDF filter is very early, in the end
I'm sure it will reach the same quality as HSSF, but for the moment its pretty new.
If you have something further along than it, I'd recommend using it and consider
converting later if you desire.

> Another issue that needs to be examined is embedding support. AFAIK our
> current filter framework support embedding quite well, i.e Excel inside
> Word will be KSpread inside KWord, CMIIW. How is the status of such
> embedding support in POI (HSSF and HDF) ?

I don't understand how this will be an issue in the end.  POIFS can read the
various embedded files and pass them to the associated filters.  You can choose
the associated filter (HSSF/HDF) and pass it through.  The "embedded" look and feal
is not the concern of POI.

> OTOH, I'm quite glad this topic is heated again :-) To Werner, even though
> the code wasn't changed in the last month, at least there's little
> activites (better than none). Like what has been mentioned, it's also
> quite annoying to improve Excel filters but the certain features in
> KSpread (such as functions) are missing which should explain why somehow I
> moved to "fix" KSpread first.

> I hope I'll be free next month and then able to keep my promise about (yet
> another) OLE storage library for KOffice. I believe libole2 will die soon,
> Jody Goldberg (from Gnumeric's fame) develops libgsf as a replacement for
> libole2 (among others) as he stated in gnome-office mailing list. Gnumeric
> and Abiword slowly switch to libgsf.

Eventually I hope to write a C or D (http://www.digitalmars.com/d http://opend.org) version of 
POI.  This will be easy for HDF which is largely generated from XML record descriptors, but
it will be much harder for POIFS due to the inherent complexity of the format.

I highly do not recommend using libole2 - its HORRIBLE code and was practically useless when
writing POIFS.  I'm not sure I recommend writing your own OLE 2 CDF thing, POIFS is great if 
you like (probably the most correct opensource implementation), and hopefully libgsf will be
good, but why start from scratch.  One thing I'd offer on this is that POIFS is very well tested
and has lots of delicious unit tests to make sure it stays that way.  HSSF is nearly as tested
and by the end of the 2.0 release will have full support for graphing and formulas.

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help should you decide to use POI for a filter.
If not, too bad, good luck.

-Andy

> Just my 2 cents.
>
> Ariya



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