[Gambas-user] 2 Questions

[Rob Kudla]

On Tue December 6 2005 14:48, johnf wrote:
> I was not aware that OOo documents are XML files?  I thought
> it was something to do with "odt".  I have been checking and I

Actually, .odt and .sxw files (and all the other 
Staroffice/Openoffice file formats starting with Openoffice 
1.0/Staroffice 6) are just JAR (Java archive) files even though 
they don't have any Java in them. In turn, JAR files are just 
ZIP files with a particular directory layout. So if you go like 
this:

unzip -l mydocument.odt

you get something like this:

  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
       39  11-09-05 06:37   mimetype
        0  11-09-05 06:37   Configurations2/
        0  11-09-05 06:37   Pictures/
      130  11-09-05 06:37   layout-cache
    20926  11-09-05 06:37   content.xml
    16383  11-09-05 06:37   styles.xml
     1120  11-09-05 06:37   meta.xml
    15555  11-09-05 06:37   Thumbnails/thumbnail.png
     7090  11-09-05 06:37   settings.xml
     1173  11-09-05 06:37   META-INF/manifest.xml
 --------                   -------
    62416                   10 files

The XML file "content.xml" contains the marked up text of your 
document; "styles.xml" contains all the formatting information, 
even for the formatting you do without explicitly applying a 
style.  There are DTD's out there for all 5 of the XML files, of 
course.  

I myself have done a lot of work with Openoffice documents in 
Perl, though since discovering the OODoc module I stopped 
getting into the nitty gritty of the XML files.

> believe the OOo guys are trying to setup a universal way of
> accessing and creating OOo documents.  There is a SDK and a
> binary "URE"  (UNO Runtime) (UNO = universal network object?)
> that the OOo doc suggest will be the way to automate OOo.  But
> at the moment it is a little over my head with regard to
> GAMBAS.  It only has Java and C++ examples.  Also it looks
> like it's some sort of client/server environment. Not what I
> was expecting.....

Writing an UNO component for Gambas is way, way out of my league, 
but if all you want to do is read and write OOo documents, the 
tools are already available even without a "gb.xml.ooo" 
component having been written.

Rob