Hi, avid OpenOffice user here, for over a year now First time I've mailed to here, I don't know if I should sign up to something or other... Anyway, here's a magnaminous suggestion, OpenOffice provides a whole bunch of stuff in a programmatic sense, by stuff meaning, widget systems, filters, dialogues, configurations and much more stuff going on underneath the hood.
+ it is a fundamentally modular application on at least a superficial level, with 5 modules, writer, calc, impress, draw, base, math. Yeah, make sense. So, what about the ability to add more or custom modules to that list? Using some published mechanism/API. They could take advantage of all that 'stuff' from the programmatical (is there such a word? =S) list of features, so for example if it dealt with vector graphics then it could use all the filters from Draw. Alright here's an example, quite a simple one, OpenOffice Music - a OpenOffice Module that provides a music notation mechanism like OO math does for maths. And it could be embbedded and utilised in writer in exactly the same way. Now OO Music probably wouldn't be considered essential enough to include in the main distro, but it would be useful for quite a few people, I know i'd want it :D. So if it was somehow optional, that would be ideal. The logical extension of this optionality is: a: that the existing modules would also be optional, thus allowing us to finally deal with the "but it installs everything when I don't want it to" issue when evangelising, and opening up the possibility of lightweight openoffice, or even OpenOffice with alternative modules (eg a port of AbiWord as an OpenOffice module, probably insane and pointless, but an example) b: that with a published mechanism there could be a slew of extented modules offering things MS Office couldn't dream of. eg MS OneNote is impressive, but atm someone who wants to add such functionality to OpenOffice might face issues as to whether it's 'the right thing for the project' and if they're 'uninitiated' they may be daunted by the code, and prefer to write a OneNote replacement seperately - but with a published mechanism for writing and plugging in such modules, the issues suddenly seem much less acute And of course then, why stop with imitating MS Office functionality, anyone want a raster editor, music player or scanner/OCR frontend integrated into their office app? I'd bet my bottom dollar some would. Of course a 'module' so to speak wouldn't neccesarily be a full fledged counterpart of the current modules, such as writer, they could work in the background. So in some ways I'm asking about a vast extension to the plugin architecture. Ideally so that isn't so much a plugin architecture, more as a Generic Framework in which the components are equal. I'm possibly making suggestions that run completely against the grain of the way OpenOffice actually works under the hood, but I feel the suggestion is worth making... otherwise it would just keep on nagging me :P -- Chris Monahan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
