On 3 Aug 2014, at 6:52 pm, Regina Henschel <rb.hensc...@t-online.de> wrote:

> Peter Kelly schrieb:
>> There's two ways to view a format: (1) as a way of encoding information
>> for storage or transmission, and (2) as an in-memory data structure used
>> by the editor at runtime. In some programs these are two different
>> things, and in others they are the same. The latter is true of web
>> browsers - HTML is both the file format and the runtime data model; the
>> W3C DOM APIs can be used to manipulate the HTML structure directly. I
>> believe this was also true to a large extent with the binary formats
>> used by older versions of MS Office, for purposes of efficiency [1].
>> 
>> I'm not familiar with the internals of OpenOffice - one thing I'd be
>> very interested to know is does it use ODF for it's in-memory
>> representation of the document? Or are the runtime data structures used
>> different to the XML trees that one finds in an ODF package?
> 
> No, OpenOffice has a very different in-memory representation than the ODF 
> format. And the API is a third version of looking at the document.

Interesting.

Given this is the case, what would you suggest would be the best strategy for 
supporting OOXML?

1) Two-way conversion between OOXML and ODF, with OpenOffice then dealing 
solely with the file as ODF (not even being aware it came from OOXML originally)
2) Two-way conversion between OOXML and OpenOffice's internal representation, 
bypassing ODF altogether

The second option has the advantage that it would be easier to cater for 
features that are supported in OOXML but not ODF, e.g. table styles. However 
the first option has the advantage that it would keep the core entirely 
separate from the OOXML filter, and could potentially be constructed as in a 
general-purpose manner and made usable as a library by other software.

--
Dr. Peter M. Kelly
Founder, UX Productivity
pe...@uxproductivity.com
http://www.uxproductivity.com/
http://www.kellypmk.net/

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