On Tuesday 27 June 2006 6:22 pm, Kay Ramme - Sun Germany - Hamburg wrote: > Hi David, > > David Wilson wrote: > > Can anyone advise us as whether OOo version 3 will preserve backwards > > file compatibility with OOo 2 ? > snip > > Does that mean, that you need the file format to become incompatible?
No. > I > thought that support for bibliographic extensions would be optional only. > In terms of the file format they would be. Older versions of Writer would just ignore the extensions. The question is how much backwards compatibility do we need to build in. In the current version of Writer every time you insert a Bibliography Entry / Citation the full set of bibliographic data (author, publisher etc.) is stored with each Entry, and no link is made with the source of the entry. The only way to correct a Bibliography Entry is to find each one and edit its data, or correct the database and reinsert the relevant Bibliography Entries. In the improved file format the Bibliographic data is stored only once and each Bibliography Entry / Citation contains a link to that data. So correction becomes easier. Links can be maintained to the originating source, such as the database, then a Update command could refresh the bibliographic data form its source. (all this explained at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_Project's_Developer_Page http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer_enhancements_for_OOBib and related pages ) So our question is - do we still have to maintain all the original Bibliography Entry structures in the save file along with the new structures so the older versions of OpenOffice can still access the some of Bibliographic data content? (The new data model is richer, so not all the data can be converted to the older structures.) A flow chart of this approach is at http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/backwards.png . In this scenario the newer Bib-enhanced versions of Writer would not display the older citation and bib-table structures but only the new ones. But would continue to maintain both, as far as was possible. A simpler option to implement would be partial backwards compatibility - that the older version of Writer would just see the visible text of the Bibliography Entries but not the underlying data. Apart from the underlying data issues, we have the question of handling how the Bibliography Entries appear on the page. If we present theses in the old style bibliographic fields, and the user does selects the command Tools->Update-'All Fields' the nicely formatted Bibliography Entries are all lost had we have the old style ones regenerated. For example Our footnote citation 34. Thomas M. Charles-Edwards,"Honour and status in Some Irish and Welsh Prose Tales.", Eriu, xxxvi, 1978. pages 298-305 becomes 34. [Charles-Edwards-78] or 34. [23] (In fact if this footnote was inserted into a Bibliography Entry field the correct italic formatting of the Journal name 'Eriu' would be lost because fields do not support formatted text.) If we keep the Bibliography Entries as text we prevent that loss, and can have correct formatting, but at the cost of limiting the users access to the underlying data. Achieving backwards compatibility of Bibliographic Table structures, is more complex. I would think the first priority for backwards compatibility is that the user of the older version of Writer sees the very well formatted Bibliography Table generated by the enhanced version of Writer. In that case we could present the Table in a, perhaps protected, text area. If we have provided the underlying bibliographic data the user then has the option to make changes to the document, delete the Bibliography Table, and Insert a new Bibliography Table, using the older, that is the current, bibliographic formatting mechanism. However, we do not see any way in which we could transfer the table style definitions from the new to the old structures, the mechanisms being so different. The user would get the default Bibliography Table style as is now the case. So these are the trade offs we are considering. Any advice would be welcome. regards David ------------------- David N. Wilson Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic OpenOffice Project http://bibliographic.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
