Bump!
...and thereby hangs a tale...
First time I looked into this was several years ago. My users—about a
thousand Danish schools—were starting to look into Ooo as a
replacement for MS Office, but needed interoperability with all the
little programs that they /have/ to use. So they came to me...
"Probably no big deal, " I said. "If I, a Comp. Sci. MS can't figure
it out, it's OPEN SOURCE! That way, if I fail, the options are open!
I can hire a consultant to do it. I can appeal to the community to
help me out. It will probably not be a big thing. After all,
supporting PowerPoint, Word, standard text boxes and IE only took
about a month each, starting from scratch"
Cue to about three years later.
* I spent about two man-months trying to puzzle out how to interface
with OOo from Delphi or BCB. Conclusion: "If it works, the
documentations is out of date, and nobody who is talking knows how."
I'm not stupid, I'm not inexperienced, and I have figured this stuff
out for several other products before, but OOo for some reason was
just impenetrable. COM/OLE support was at least back then obscure and/
or broken, and badly documented, and direct support for Delphi or BCB
was the same, even more so. I could be wrong, but I really tried my
best to find out, and asked around quite a bit.
* I spent more than $2.000 on having some consultants claim "Oh,
we'll do it", waited for half a year, and then they went "...err, we
couldn't figure it out after all". Those were the ones everybody in
the Danish OOo community pointed me to.
* I asked for help in the relevant mailinglists several times. No
takers. None. Sank like a stone.
So now, a few months ago, a user writes me something like "Why not
support OOo? We want to get rid of Office, but lack of support from
your software holds back the switch. If you can't figure it out, it's
OPEN SOURCE! That way, if you fail, the options are open! You can
hire a consultant to do it! You can appeal to the community to help
you out! It will probably not be a big thing! After all, you already
support PowerPoint, Word......".
At first I was like "OK, been down that road before... Apparently
it's just a lot harder than it seems, and no professionals want to
wrestle with it, even for money, and no community people want to do
it for free, and I for sure do NOT have the time for it right now, as
I have thrown far too much time down that hole already", but he kept
going "perhaps things have changed" and "I will poke people if
nothing happens" etc.
Now I am not blaming you guys in the OOo community: Your time is
valuable, and you have every right to not pick up the glove, and
accept the challenge. But my time is valuable too, and this is
probably the last time I am going to attempt this. If nobody steps
up, or points to an outfit that will do this for money (and I will
pay well), me supporting OOo is probably out for good, as this will
be the second time I have invested non-trivial resources in this with
nothing to show for it... and my answer to anybody that asks will
probably be to forward them this email, or something very similar to it.
I want to make it absolutely clear that I /do/ appreciate that you
guys (Hi Mathias) helped me a bit down the road. I am trying to pay
you the curticy of explaining what my motivation and reasoning is,
and to let you guys - the OOo community - know what is going on here.
I know that I am not the centre of the world, and that my problem is
probably not the biggest barrier to OOo adoption, but is /is/ real,
and I bet other SMV's have the same problems I have...
Sincerely,
Anders
Den 06/04/2006 kl. 20.49 skrev Anders Johansen:
Bump!
Any takers?
As mentioned, I am NOT able to do this on my own - the start-up time
needed to get sufficiently acquainted with OOo development is simply
too extensive for me. I will however appreciate a solution, and am
quite willing (and able) to pay for it if need be.
Sincerely,
Anders S. Johansen, SecondGuess ApS
Den 29/03/2006 kl. 2.47 skrev Anders Johansen:
Den 27/03/2006 kl. 18.43 skrev Mathias Bauer:
Anders Johansen wrote:
You see, from my point of view the ORDER of the text blocks does
not
matter. I do not have to parse the text in the order it is
written or
read, really, although it would be nice if the order was
somewhat sane.
OK, so the tricky part will be to have a reliable algorithm that
"serializes" every possible arrangement of text on a single
Writer page.
Or the whole text of a document? Should be doable but needs some
thinking. After this coding will not be the biggest problem. :-)
Yup!
Did I mention that I am quite willing to pay somebody for doing
this, if it's more complicated than "just an afternoon's work"? :D
I forgot to mention: if you want to use char* to address
strings there
is another problem because OOo strings are 16Bit UniCode
strings, so a
suitable data type should be used. You could workaround this by
converting all strings received by our API to UTF-8 encoded
strings in
the DLL with C-API but then you can't rely on the usual pointer
arithmetics.
Don't need pointer calcs. Just need to replace a chunk of text with
something else for spell checking or word prediction.
So you would be fine with getting the text as UTF-8 encoded byte
strings?
Absolutely! As long as the encoding is known, I'm happy as a clam,
and I'm only supporting roman letter languages anyway, so...
Sincerely,
Anders
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