Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

[Kevin Rodgers <kevin.d.rodgers@gmail.com>]

On 1/5/11 12:38 AM, Tassilo Horn wrote:
> "Stephen J. Turnbull"<stephen@xemacs.org>  writes:
>>   >  But I think that conversion from and to ODF is not the right approach to
>>   >  support ODF editing in Emacs.  Imagine a colleague sends you an ODF file
>>   >  she created using LibreOffice, you convert it to something Emacs can
>>   >  handle,
>>
>> Uh, just teach jka-compr or crypt++ that it's a zipfile, and what
>> you'll see in the buffer is XML, no?  Since when is Emacs handicapped
>> w.r.t. XML?
>
> No, you got me wrong.  Emacs already figures out it's a zip file, and of
> course you can edit the content.xml in it (which is horrible slow,
> because all the XML is on one line).  Maybe, one might need to update
> some metadata as well, who knows, but that should be doable.

Maybe insert newlines when reading the XML in and delete them when writing it
out. (Newlines can safely be inserted before start-tags within element content.)

> My concern was converting ODF to some more human-editable format like
> LaTeX or DocBook.  And here, converting forth and back has a high
> potential to lead to data loss for things the converters cannot handle,
> like OpenDocument spreadsheets embedded in text documents.

-- 
Kevin Rodgers
Denver, Colorado, USA