Re: [fw-general] Support for Office 2007

[Davey Shafik]

I have been thinking on this since I started Cerebral Cortex, along  
with OOo support.

I /will/ be needing this for work sometime in the near future, so  
count me in for working on it :)

My final goal for this sorta thing is the ability to abstract it out  
enough do something like:

$document = new Document;
$document->addHeader("My Header", $options);
$document->addParagraph("My paragraph goes here", $options);

$renderer = Document::getRenderer(Document::WORD_XML_2007);

$document->render($renderer);

But I think we need to work on more complete support for the formats  
first and THEN
abstract on top of that for those who want it simpler.

I would like to see fairly complete support for:

Documents:
        * OfficeHTML Word
        * Word XML 2003
        * Word XML 2007
        * OOo Write
        * PDF

Spreadsheets:
        * OfficeHTML Excel
        * Excel XML 2003
        * Excel XML 2007
        * OOo Calc

Further to this, I would love to see a Graphing library, would be  
very cool if you
export the graphs to any of the formats above, as well as regular  
images formats (JPG,
GIF, PNG, SVG). Charting is the *one* thing I really liked about  
ColdFusion - automatic
drilldown with image map/flash generation and such :)

- Davey

On Dec 18, 2006, at 12:38 AM, Andi Gutmans wrote:

Hi all,

I've been thinking for a while now to see if there are people  
interested in
adding support for Office 2007 documents to framework. Thanks to  
the new
format being XML-based and apparently an open-standard it should be  
much
easier to pull-off than the previous binary Office formats. It's  
also pretty
useful that Microsoft made available a compatibility plug-in for  
Office 2003
(http://tinyurl.com/y4eeye) which allows it to load the new XML-based
format.

Recently Maarten (cc'ed) posted some code which refers to some work  
he did
to create some basic Office 2007 Excel spreadsheet support. This  
reminded me
of my interest in working on this subject.

Judging by the amount of work Alex has put into Zend_Pdf I must say  
that
this will definitely not be a small trivial amount of work. The  
Office 2007
formats are huge, and even if we limit what we support (like we did  
with
PDF), it will still be a large amount of work and will probably  
require
several contributors and a good sense for making decisions of what  
we should
support and what not (the latter usually being the hard part :)

If any of you are interested, I suggest to join the
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list (please don't respond to fw- 
general@)
so that we can try and see whether there's enough interest and  
enough people
willing to contribute to making this happen. Let's start the  
discussion only
on Tuesday so that interested developers have a chance to join the  
mailing
list prior to that.

Andi