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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: KWord to OOWriter filter (also call for developers)
From:       David Faure <dfaure () trolltech ! com>
Date:       2004-01-26 9:36:20
Message-ID: 200401261036.20178.dfaure () trolltech ! com
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On Monday 26 January 2004 06:32, Raphael Langerhorst wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I guess this time I was too good about guessing that I only have 2 hours/week 
> for this :-/
> 
> a) Are you (Nicolas, David,?) already working on something?

We're working on the filters at the moment, without touching the actual applications
yet. I'm working on the OOWriter -> KWord-1.3 filter (backporting all changes to
the branch, so that 1.3.1 will have a 100%-complete OOWriter importer(*)).

Nicolas is working on a KWord-1.3 -> OOWriter filter, with much concern
and trouble for KWord documents going back to the kword-0.8 syntax :)

I'm almost done with the 'old import' filter. Then I'll start integrating its code
with KWord itself, for native loading of OOWriter files.

Do you want to do the same kind of work with the OOImpress<->KPresenter
converters? Or maybe OOCalc<->KSpread?
(I believe the former is easier since so much is in common with the 
OOWriter<->KWord filters).

> b) Since I'm still totally new to the KOffice source code I would first like 
> to read an introduction for developers - and since AFAIK something of this 
> kind (in the order of 30 to 100 pages) is not available I would suggest I 
> start with it - a kind of developer cookbook. By writing such a document as I 
> go on analyzing the code, other (to be) developers would also benefit (and be 
> more attracted...). And when this has made some progress then I feel better 
> about working on the source itself :)
> The cookbook should cover at least the code structure and the different parts 
> (the apps, independent areas in those apps (filters, user 
> interface, ..., ???) and how all works together.
> Since it doesn't look like my time slice for KOffice is getting bigger soon I 
> would really love to see someone (with more knowledge than me) at least doing 
> the "big overview" about the project since it would take a very long time for 
> me to this. But I would very much like to help on smaller parts - the filter 
> system for example. Once I know about the overall working of KOffice it 
> should be easier to comprehend the smaller/specialized pieces.

I think such a developer cookbook is only necessary for people working on the core
application functionality. You don't need to learn anything about KWord/KPresenter/KSpread's
source code to write a filter. For that you only need a "filter developer cookbook",
which IIRC is already in a reasonably good shape on www.koffice.org.

The problem is that to fully understand all of the code in KOffice, you first
need to completely grasp the underlying technologies (KIO, KParts, DCOP...).
Then the layer above those that is in kofficecore. Definitely not the easiest
place to start understanding though. It's very possible to add a feature
to a KOffice application, or fix bugs, without understanding all that.

But the very basic design (document/view) should be understood, yes.
Some sort of docu about that was written in kofficecore/DESIGN, but that's
more like a list of answers to someone's specific questions about this.
Feel free to start from that and write something bigger, this list is there to
answer your questions.

BTW it is very possible that kotext will *completely* change once
Qt4 is out - or once KPainter is ready, whichever road we take, so I don't
see any purpose in documenting that part.

-- 
David FAURE, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
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