RFC: ideas for a simple OpenDocument API

[Thomas Zander]

On Saturday 23 December 2006 12:09, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> I agree that roundtrip capability would be very nice, however I'd rather
> have this limitation than having to deal with a full blown OpenDocument API
> for just simple tranfers.

There is a similar idea thats been floating around the minds of various ODF 
people for some time.
The idea to have an ODF API so you can inserts a stream and instead of the 
normal sax/dom APIs you'd use a higher level ODF api to query the 'file'.
Just like a DOM tree you can just alter one or two properties and then write 
out the while file again without loosing data your app doesn't know about.

At Akademies ODF-day this also came up and there were lots of people 
interrested in this idea. We even started an mailinglist [1], but since there 
was no code and not a clear idea on where to get that code from it stopped 
there.

I am pretty sure that if you have a nice framework to hang this concept on, 
which allows you to alter the dept and broadness of the API using plugins etc 
it would be picked up and added to.

> I imagine a simple API being part of kdelibs for non-native data transfer
> and using some KOffice library for "editing" real documents.

KOffice applications all intend to use ODF as the dataformat for clipboard 
actions, and it would be great if you can then copy paste from KWord to 
KWrite without falling back to the plain-text part :)

> The KOffice developers are most likely the ones who can give input on this
> since they know the complexity involved with the full support and can
> likely estimate if partial support would be easier to implement and
> maintain.

There are two parts to this;
the first is to provide an API to simply get the text and get (some) markup.
The second is to provide a way to convert from one document format to another. 
KOffice already has the second in a large part in its filters technology.
There will be lots of interrest in the first, if only someone would start 
writing it :)


1) https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/odf-api
-- 
Thomas Zander
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