On Fri, 02 Apr 1999, Reginald Stadlbauer wrote:
>Hi!
>I looked now at MSWordView and also how it is used in AbiWord and think that it
>is really not a hard task to implement a Word 97 import for KWord that way. But
>as I have quite a lot of other things to do in KWord and KPresenter currently, I
>think I will not find the time to implement that. So is there anybody out here
>who wants to implement something like that. 
>
>The concept of writing filters is quite easy in KOffice - they are standalone
>programs which get a string which contains the content of the file (in the
>foreign format) and return a string with the file in XML. E.g. take a look in
>koffice/kword/filters/ascii or koffice/kspread/filters/komma.
>
>I'm willing to help with informations about writing the filter and about the
>KWord XML format, but I just have not the time to implement it now. So please,
>if you are interested, speak up now!

My experience with XML programming is with java and IBM's xml4j only. I started
working on a KWord->HTML converter in java. xml4j implements the W3C "Document
Object Model" (DOM), which means that it uses a standard API to designate XML
elements and do basic operations on them. The little from what I saw of KWord's
handling of XML is that operations are implemented as string manipulations.

Alas, I am not a C++ coder so I won't carry the burden myself, but for those
starting to code with XML, it might be worthwhile to consider standardizing on
using W3C's DOM API.

-cjr