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

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 10:56, Lee Braiden wrote:
> 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...

I understood your point; Storage is alternate mechanism for
accomplishing the goal.

In the case of the OO.o's files you need to pull the content and the
meta data from source1 and source2 to temp files in temp directory, then
diff the dir.  This is very doable with a wrapper that prepares the
files before calling diff.

In the case of graphics like SVG, there are two awkward complications. 
The data will not always be understandable since the file is a set of
instructions for redering an image.  Many GUI editors take the liberty
of rearranging the XML to suit the tools needs; a trivial addition of a
line might cause the tool to dramatically restructure the file.

Subversion can handle binary revisions, but I'm not familiar with how it
handles the diffs.

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sinzui cox net
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