Re: [libreoffice-users] use of flat xml formats

On Tue, 27 Sep 2011, planas wrote:

> On Tue, 2011-09-27 at 14:41 +0100, e-letter wrote: 
>
> > Is there a logical reason why xslt filters need to be selected
> > manually for installation? Flat xml file formats are a very good
> > feature, especially for document version control. Why is flat xml not
> > the default file format for LO?
>
> I am not sure which filters come installed in the base configuration
> because I tend install all the filters.
>
> The ODF formats are default because they are official (ISO?) standards
> for general purpose office type documents. Because ODF formats are an
> international standard producers of office suites - in theory - should
> support the latest version (1.2) allowing users to easily share
> documents no matter what program produced the original. MS has not
> implemented 1.2 support yet in MSO 2010. I believe the ODF formats are a
> type of compressed xml file. The issue of flat xml is whether other,
> particularly commercial, suites directly support the format. My
> suspicion  is FLOSS projects probably do but commercial support may be
> erratic.

Cfr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_technical_specification

----

  Document Representation

  The OpenDocument format supports the following two ways of document
  representation:

  - As a single XML document - also known as Flat XML or Uncompressed XML
    Files. Single OpenDocument XML files are not widely used. Filename
    extensions for a single OpenDocument XML documents are not defined in
    the OpenDocument technical specification, but commonly used are .xml,
   .fodt,[1][2] .fods, ... etc.

  - As a collection of several subdocuments within a package, each of
    which stores part of the complete document. This is the common
    representation of OpenDocument documents. It uses filename extensions
    such as .odt, .ott, .ods, .odp ... etc. The package is a standard ZIP
    file with different filename extension and with defined structure of
    subdocuments. Each subdocument within a package has a different
    document root and stores a particular aspect of the XML document. All
    types of documents (e.g. text and spreadsheet documents) use the same
    document and subdocuments definitions.

----

I am writing an AsciiDoc backend to produce ODF files directly from 
AsciiDoc. I was also looking for a flat file importer. Currently 
LibreOffice and OpenOffice want to open such a .fodt (or .xml) file as 
text rather than an pure ODF file.

Flat ODF file support would be useful to anyone producing/converting 
simple ODF files, and can help with learning/debugging ODF. It could be
very useful to the larger ODF development community.

Kind regards,
--
-- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, info@dagit.net, http://dagit.net/

[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]

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