On 6 Feb 2004, Johan Ceuppens wrote:
On Thu, 05 Feb 2004 22:50:47 -0500 MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> mused:
We should probably look at how much we can/want to interoperate with OpenOffice too.
I'm working more or less on something similar for inkview. For now, inkview will be able to read a jar file with a slideshow sequence file in it. I'll start with a simple plain text file with the order of files in it (XML later on). This way windows users in particular can have more flexibility for their slideshows. I might be able to intergrate some simple sequence file editor in inkview too. There is some code for this already in CVS in the form of libinkjar. In the long term we could use this lib for having references to bitmap files in the jar file etc.
Sounds like a good approach, and something that'd be fairly easy to build on later as needed.
I'm not too familiar with openoffice file formats, but would we need to define our own format for this ? Is there maybe some gnome work underway for this in the form of a lib (I still need to look at libgsf) ?
OOo documents are a set of XML and other files in a compressed archive, exactly like we're talking about. There might be a spec around describing how these are assembled. GNOME may also have some libs for managing compound documents. As mentioned, the JAR format is also documented. Whether these approaches would suit our needs would take some further investigation.
I think it would be highly beneficial if we could adopt an existing standard for assembling our packaged file, as it potentially could potentially increase the likelihood of interoperability with other apps, or at least be one thing less we'd have to document and maintain. ;-)
Bryce