Re: What is GNOME office?

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 03:54:45PM -0500, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >I would be really interested on feedback on this especially the generic
> >package proposal.
> >Also did you tried to compare your XML format and OpenOffice one, are the
> >structure fundamentally different or do using XSLT to transform from one
> >format to the other seems doable ?
> 
> I was planning on looking at the OpenOffice DTDs/Specs/etc over the weekend. 
> There are like 20 DTDs though and amount to about 300 pages of information 
> (as opposed to ~120 for RTF). Granted, they do cover every detail under the 
> sun for WPs, SpreadSheets, etc... so the wordiness is warranted.

  yes that's a very large and complete doc, which is good but takes a while
to review (I didn't had time myself, I just looked at the output for a couple
of simple documents and it looks 'sane').

> I wasn't planning on using XSLT to convert between formats. This may or may 
> not be doable with XSLT in its current state, but I'll know that for sure 
> after this weekend (i.e. the doc may need some complex transformations to 
> get from OO->ABW that XSLT can't yet handle). For now, I was planning on 
> just subclassing our generic XML importer class to handle as many OO 
> tags/features as possible like our existing 5 or so XML importers currently 
> do.

  Okay this is sensible too, a bit more hardwired, but probably easier
to set-up.

> It shouldn't involve too much code that way and doesn't involve an 
> intermediate conversion step (we treat our ABW importer/exporter as just 
> another importer/exporter that "happens" to have a very clean mapping to our 
> internal structure). Then comes the OO exporter, which should be done at 
> about the same time.

  I noticed something in your answer which raised my attention, it
was "round tripping Docbook". How complete is this ? Is this based on the
XML Docbook DTD or the SGML version ? I sent a query to the XML-Dev list
about free Docbook editors and the only hint I got back was about a KWrite
patch. How long do you think it would take to have something suitable for
the GNOME doc team (including some non-trivial thing like external parsed
entities and/or validation) ?

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard w3 org | W3C, INRIA Rhone-Alpes  | libxml Gnome XML toolkit
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