2006/5/12, A.J. Venter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> 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.
Indeed; in another project we are planning to work with OOo document
to produce reports. It is just too simple. I know there is a 'python'
project for a odt file viewer.
(http://visioo-writer.tuxfamily.org/EN/index.html) Maybe there are
simple tricks to convert a document with xslt magic. I dont know.
We could indeed write the doc in a odt compatible editor (like Writer)
then we could use xslt stuff to export to other format if we want
(like HTML). All these features are included in OOo 2.
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.
--
Alexandre Leclerc
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