Re: Extending the Gnome search capabilities to be able to search in OOo files

[Lee Braiden <jel ntlworld com>]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 10:40:09AM -0500, Curtis C. Hovey wrote:
> Take a look at http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/features.html.  Seth
> Nickell envisioned a similar mechanism.  Smart apps would use version
> control in place of saving documents, opting instead to mark revisions. 
> Document collaboration would take a great leap forward.
> 
> The metadata Db I want to create is very compatible with Storage. 

Sorry, I didn't fully explain myself.  In truth, I've been having email
problems lately, and wasn't really expecting that reply to get anywhere ;)

What I'm thinking is a related, but slightly different idea of exposing
the internals of file formats to diff, in a way that would let diff
show what has changed in a wordprocessor document, drawing, etc.

Essentially, this is straightforward with text-based applications like
wordprocessors.  The only issue is that, for example, with OpenOffice,
the data is hidden in XML inside a zip archive.  If diff knew how to
recognise the archive, look inside, and compare the parts rather than
the binary whole, it would be a long way to showing the difference
between two openoffice documents as naturally as with two text files.

It would be a lot tougher for drawings etc, but maybe not impossible,
if they're based on XML, and some 'summary' could be done.  Perhaps
even if drawings had thumbnails, the difference could be a
highlighted area in the thumbnail...


-- 
Lee.