Re: GNOME spreadsheet work in progress

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Sergey I. Panov wrote:
> 
>  I can not speak for other people, but for me it was the vector
> drawing program that should have high, publishing quality. The only
> thing I want from the ploting program is to be able to export plots
> in the format accepted as native by the vector drawing program. The

I agree with this. In fact I think there should be one shared "structured
objects on a page" file format common to a vector drawing program like
GYVE, a page layout program like the defunct GLUe, and exported by any
program that generates this kind of output (presentation programs, plot
programs, the spreadsheet). This would be a big feature compared to other
platforms with proprietary non-interoperable software. PostScript is the
nearest thing to such a file format but PostScript isn't an editable
format. 

Think how neat it would be to be able to export a file like this from
Excel, and then tweak it in Quark to make it look just how you want.
This would also mean that the plot program and spreadsheet don't need any
builtin drawing or editing capabilities.

It would also make it much easier to add printing to an application, since
it wouldn't be necessary to know PostScript.

However, cool as it would be, I don't have time to write it. Perhaps the
GYVE people have already done so - they could possibly port it back to
plain C and put it in a library.

Havoc