Imp/Exp filters and BFD: was (Decoupling Gnome Office)

["David T. Bath" <bathd edipost auspost com au>]

Perhaps the most difficult part of developing OSS
office suites for standard hackers is the ability to
deal with foreign formats, such as MS-Word or WordPerfect.

The StarOffice guys obviously did a brilliant job of
grokking the format, and perhaps only companies with the
resources of StarOffice or Sun can keep track of what
the evil empire is doing with file formats.

What is the possibility of the Import/Export filters
from StarOffice being excised as separate executables
or libraries that can be called by WHATEVER program
wants to read/write them.

Consider an analogy with the BFD utilities such as
objdump, but applied to office documents rather than
object files.

-- 
David T. Bath bathd@edipost.auspost.com.au
+613 9204 8713 (W) 0418 316 634 (Mbl)