I don't know how to answer this, maybe someone else will be able to do it. Right now, most of abiword's filters are built in, although there's no real reason they shouldn't be transformed into plugins. However, I can't see exactly how can gnumeric (for instance) benefit in terms of code from a load word doc plugin...
I'm going to move all but 4 of our filters into plugins after Abi's 1.0 release (DOC imp, TXT imp/exp, HTML exp, ABW imp/exp).
As for filters being pushed into a libgnomeoffice type place, I think that we might have to evaluate that on a per-filter basis. The task will be *hard* and some things just won't map cleanly (Gnumeric loading DOC, Abi loading XLS, ...) nor do I see them being necessarily worthwhile.
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