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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Wannabe-developer requests some help;
From:       Nicolas Goutte <nicolasg () snafu ! de>
Date:       2004-10-10 8:05:01
Message-ID: 200410101005.01494.nicolasg () snafu ! de
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On Saturday 09 October 2004 14:15, HLV Kwint wrote:
> Hi, I'm Hans Kwint, living in the Netherlands, and new to this list.
> I'd like to help KOffice, and I have thought out a practical task for
> myself already, concerning KWord-filters (If you are not concerned at all
> with KWord filters, I think you can skip this post). I'll explain in the
> next paragraph:

Welcome!

>
> Yesterday I read a discussion concerning the language of openoffice
> filters. There was a 'problem', the filters converting the
> openoffice-format to the MS-word format were documented in Deutsch
> (German), and poorly written (they are a mess?) if some people in the
> discussion are right.

Well, personally, I think that the German comment problem is only a small part 
of the global problem.

Even if you can read them, you have done only a single step. For example it 
would still not explain what an uncommented constant might mean.

>
> It's a good idea to have some nice MS-filters, I think, since the rest of
> the world isn't convinced they should stick to OASIS-formats (everybody
> knows MS policies I think).

> So the thing I'd like to do, is (I'll begin small), get the source of those
> openoffice-filters, and translate the German comments to English to start
> with. After I translated the comments, maybe I know something about how the
> filters are built up.

> So, (I don't know in which programming language those filters are made up),

C++ in both cases (KOffice and OpenOffice.org).

> maybe I can then try to to structurize them a bit (pretty amibious maybe,
> but one has to have some ambitions I think).

:-)

> Hopefully, if I understand a bit of the thing, I can try to write a filter
> for koffice based upon that openoffice filter. However, I don't know if we
> can just use that filter without restrictions, but since openoffice is
> open-source, I think it's better to use their filter instead of
> 'reinventing the wheel'.

We could use OpenOffice.org's LGPL license.

But you will probably not be able to use the code just like that. (But you 
might try to understand what the code does and then try to re-implement it.)

>
> After that, the most ambitious part, I'd like to help making a filter from
> OASIS format to MS-word format. I think this is something KOffice users
> defenitly want.

Then perhaps you could help us to continue KWord's RTF export filter. It is 
much easier to develop than trying to create a native MS Word export filter.

(But I cannot do much, as I do not have any MS Word (anymore), so it is 
difficult to check if MS Word will still correctly read a file after a 
change.)

>
(...)

Have a nice day!

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