Sharing template folders with LO/AOO & Co.

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

has it been discussed before if and how templates installed on the system 
could be shared with other ODF programs?

At least (by idea of OpenDocument) theoretically templates should be usable by 
any ODF program. For those templates which make use of special features only 
available in a certain ODF program (incl. min. version) there could be some 
info in the metadata of the template, so a program could consider whether to 
offer the template to the user. Or some global "New document" applet could 
decide which programs to offer for a chosen template.

E.g. I have a folder on my system
/usr/share/templates/libreoffice
and with OpenSUSE there are a few packages with just ODF templates which 
install there, e.g.
libreoffice-templates-de - German Templates for LibreOffice
libreoffice-templates-labels-a4 - A4 Size Label Templates for LibreOffice
libreoffice-templates-presentation-layouts - Presentation Layout Templates for 
LibreOffice

I tried them with Calligra, and most are quite usable. Just, they are not 
offered as templates within Calligra, all programs restrict themselves to 
their own set of templates. Which is a Fail! for me.

So, would you welcome any effort to get to shared template folders?

For a start Calligra programs could just start to browse also the content of 
the known folders of AOO and LO (and else?). But in the long run there should 
be implementation independent locations IMHO. Like 
/usr/share/templates/OpenDocument
or perhaps even better generically namespace with the mimetypes
/usr/share/templates/application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template etc.

The current usage in Calligra of the desktop files and the preview icons for 
the templates currently is for historic reasons, ideally the data would be 
stored directly in the meta data of the template, right?

And integrated support for Template stores with a web APIs like 
http://opentemplate.org/ or http://templates.libreoffice.org/template-center 
(hm, is there a web API?) would be also great to have. Both for adding to the 
local template store as well as a one-time template.

Cheers
Friedrich