You are very much welcome to contribute! A short contribution guidelines is here: http://poi.apache.org/guidelines.html
Get used to the basic Ant targets: "ant compile", "ant test" and "ant docs". Note, that the first invocation of "ant compile" will take quite some time because it will download all jar dependencies . The documentation on the MS Office file formats can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx (binary) and http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm (ooxml) This is a "must have" for a POI contributor. Requests for enhancements and bug reports are submitted via Bugzilla: http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?product=POI Perhaps, a good start would be to review open tickets for the HSLF and XSLF components and see if you can resolve any of them. Regards, Yegor On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 4:26 AM, Ali Alsaif <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi there > > Thank you guys for your hard work! Several months ago I was in need of a > java library to help me go through some ppt files and I have to admit your > work is amazing. I noticed that most of the developers are focused on excel > and spreadsheet files. I would like to contribute as well. > > I'm a second year computer science major. I admit I'm very inexperienced > when it comes to open sourcing and I would like to to change that. > > I wasn't able to find a good tutorial or documentation to help me get > started on your project though. I use eclipse IDE on a mac OS. I've followed > the instructions on the how to build page and set up Ant and Forrest. I also > have downloaded the source code through the svn repository. Now my mind went > blank. I don't know where to go from here. I know I want to work on the HSLF > and XSLF components the most and planning on learning about the different > file formats microsoft uses. But, I'm still don't know how to interact with > the source code from a developers view. How do I build? how do I test code > that already exists? I have many questions which most of them would be a > little stupid compared to what goes on this mailing list. :) > > I am a beginner in open source programming, building libraries, and > interacting with office documents. But, I'm very excited to learn from > this experience and contribute as much as I can to the project. Would anyone > hold my hands till I can stand on my feet ? :) > > Thank you > Ali Al Saif > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
