> Indeed, I think the idea would be a by-product just as a pdf in that > case. A viewer would not be simple to do, but the format is simple. > The file is actually a zip file with xml stuff files in it. Indeed, OOo's file are quite easy to hack. It's zipped up xml - the reason it was chosen by the ODF as their standard is exactly that, not only is it fully publicly document - it is a non-binary format, and it will always be possible to write another unzip+xml-parsing routine.
I wouldn't depend on OOo for reading at all - I think depending on it for editing help files is a minor, if anything it is a feature rather than a bug as the writer is a very lovely interface for the task. Just think a moment about what this could do - the IDE can generate the class description as an OOo template - the programmer fires up OOo, opens the template and writes the complete doc, saves the odt and done. A bigger factor IMHO is that OOo has way too many features, if we don't use writer as our viewer then we need to code a viewer to display writer files and it will almost by default lose formatting because nobody here feels like cloning the entire OOo codebase (sorry - I don't contribute to java projects as a matter of principle :p ) A.J. -- "80% Of a hardware engineer's job is application of the uncertainty principle. 80% of a software engineer's job is pretending this isn't so." A.J. Venter Chief Software Architect OpenLab International http://www.getopenlab.com | +27 82 726 5103 (South Africa) http://www.silentcoder.co.za | +55 118 162 2079 (Brazil) _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
