Re: "dual" files

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2004 robsta stereolyzer net wrote:

> Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 15:39:19 +0200
> From: robsta stereolyzer net
> To: gnome-office-list gnome org
> Subject: "dual" files
>
>
> Hello,
>
> recently i was thinking about a generic file viewer/reader for GNOME.
> Eog does this job for images but it would be really cool IMHO to be

Eog is nice but it is really gdkpixbuf that does all the hard work, I
still marvel at the fact that just by adding support for a file format to
gdkpixbuf a wealth of applications all gain support for that file format.

> able to view all kinds of files even though you might not have the
> actual file-producing application installed.


> The XML nature of the gnumeric and abiword file
> format should allow for that pretty easily (in theory at least :-)

It might be useful if you could produce as XSL to convert and display
Abiword XML documents to simple marked up text with basic formating.
That way all you would need is an application capable of transforming and
viewing XML documents (like Mozilla) combinded with a stylesheet to view
abiword documents.

Years ago I took an abiword document, renamed it from document.abw to
document.xml and added one line pointing to a very basic cascading
stylesheet (almost an empty stylesheet).  This was enought to get Mozilla
to show the text of the document (instead of the markup).

With a more complex stylesheet (CSS or XSL) I believe you could produce a
decent document viewer.

- Alan H.