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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Fwd: Announcement: Initial Revision of a WordPerfect Filter for OpenWriter
From:       Ariya Hidayat <ariya () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-11-07 10:28:20
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In addition, I will co-operate with William Lachance and Marc Maurer towards a 
better and usable libwpd (in case you're wondering, libwpd to WordPerfect is 
just like wv2 to Word). So, expect next version of KWord and Abiword to share 
the same WordPerfect filter.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Announcement: Initial Revision of a WordPerfect Filter for OpenWriter
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 04:28:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Lachance Will <w_lach@yahoo.ca>
To: dev@wp.openoffice.org
Cc: j.m.maurer@student.utwente.nl, ariya@kde.org

I am pleased to announce that an initial revision of a
WordPerfect file filter (import only, 6/7/8/9/10
files) is available at http://libwpd.sourceforge.net.
It is distributed in source form, and has only been
tested under Linux (sorry, I don't have Win32
development tools! If a Windows developer wants to
take a look at this, I'd be very grateful)

This was developed independantly by me (William
Lachance) using a library (libwpd) written primarily
by Marc Maurer and myself (using a set of unicode
mappings by Ariya Hidayat to handle WordPerfect
extended characters).

Right now, the filter supports a subset of
WordPerfect's full functionality: paragraphs, text
properties (bold, etc.), text alignment, margin
widths, and columns. There are only a few caveats: you
have to explicitly select the WordPerfect type in the
file selector: I imagine this is due to some sort of
tricky type-detection problem. Another (perhaps
related) problem is that it doesn't fail properly: if
you (for example) load a WordPerfect 5.1 document, it
will open an empty document which claims to be the
document you opened. Other than that, it seems to
import the subset of features that we do support quite
nicely (it works on every document that I've tested).

The file filter was developed as a component using the
XFilter framework (see http://xml.openoffice.org).
This has several advantages: perhaps the most
interesting of them is the ability to execute the
filter outside of
OpenOffice.org (theoretically, I haven't tested this
yet).

Another thing that is worth mentioning is our
infrastructure: the parsing code is delegated to an
external library-- libwpd, improvements there can
benefit any application that writes a (relatively
simple) filter that interface with it. Marc and I have
an experimental filter for AbiWord that uses libwpd,
and it is hoped that a future version of libwpd will
form the basis of KWord's WordPerfect import/export.

We (myself, Marc Maurer, and anyone else who's
interested) aim to improve the underlying library
(libwpd) to support tables, embedded images, paragraph
styles, lists, footnotes, endnotes, etc. (i.e.:
everything WordPerfect does). :-) We also plan to
support WordPerfect 5.x files, as well as the ability
to export WordPerfect documents.

I am unsure how our efforts fit into the current
WordPerfect project (http://wp.openoffice.org): this
is something that will have to be discussed over the
coming days and weeks.

Currently, libwpd is licensed under the LGPL, while
the OpenWriter filter is licensed under the GPL. Marc
and I have put a considerable amount of unpaid effort
into making all this work correctly (getting an
OpenOffice filter up and running was particularly
painful). While we are committed to continuing work on
libwpd (under the current licensing terms), financial
renumeration would be appreciated from anyone who has
an interest
in our work.

--
For those interested, I have learned quite a bit about
writing OpenOffice.org filters in the last few weeks.
I've created a text import filter (which will be
licensed under public domain) and have started work on
accompanying tutorial. I hope to post this in the next
few days.

Many thanks go out to the OpenOffice developers (you
know who you are) who helped me understand enough of
the OpenOffice internals to make this possible.

More soon,

William Lachance
w_lach@yahoo.ca

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