Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 04:15:08PM -0500, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>   Ideal is if Gnumeric eventually made use of this common library, but
> that will relate to how useful this library becomes (quality, etc).  We
> are making no assumptions here, and plan to only support a stand-alone
> file conversion utility from Quattro Pro to the OASIS Open Office format
> (currently only loaded by OOo that I know about).
 
A stand alone converter ?  That is very interesting.

Gnumeric is ideally suited to supporting that use case.  The
necessary work breaks sown into three segments

1) Write an OO exporter for Gnumeric.  This is fairly simple in that
   there are already several exporters and the architecture for writing
   another is already in place.

2) Continue work on the qpro importer to add support for more
   features, and newer formats.  This is also a fairly well defined
   area to work in.  There are docs for the new formats (although
   they don't seem terribly accurate in spots).  Additionally it
   should be simpler to extend an existing framework than starting
   from scratch.

3) The only tricky issue would be some discussion on how to handle
   and organise command line arguments from plugins.  However, I've
   given this a fair amount of thought and believe this should be
   doable.

The net result would be a command line based application capable of
translated between any of gnumeric's supported formats.

>   I believe the OASIS TC mailing list is open for people to subscribe and 
> post to.  Have your comments been made available to that group?
No.  Thus far I've only interacted with OO.

>   OASIS thus far has been evaluating the OOo formats, but will not stick
> to them if they are fundamentally deficient.  They may just not be
> receiving the level of feedback that you could provide on the spreadsheet
> side of things.

Quite possible,  I'll attempt to make the relevant connections.  I
do not want to characterise the format as deficient.  It has several
nice features.  Gnumeric could easily store most data using the
proposal.  The flaws relate to whether it is convenient and
efficient to do so.

> I am actually surprised that RedHat, Ximian, Xandros
> or other such vendor aren't sending GNOME Office folks given how important
> this TC may be to the adoption of Free Software on the desktop.

GNOME Office has no official corporate sponsors at this time.  Given
the current economic landscape many distributors are content to rely
on Sun to market and promote OO.  There aren't many financial
resources available for marketing GNOME Office.