From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2003 - 15:27:31 EDT
> I am writing an article about the standard XML
> format for office
> documents being developed by the OASIS consortium. I
> haven't been able
> to find on www.abisource.com any indication about if
> and how Abiword
> will support that format, or, better, make it its
> default.
>
> What is your opinion? Yes,no, why yes, why no... Any
> feedback is
> greatly appreciated.
As Alan and Zen have said, yes, we do have
import/export plugins for the OpenOffice format which
are pretty good and we've shipped with the development
series of AbiWord.
We're remarkably unlikely to ever make the SXW format
the default one. If we were to change, it would make
much more sense for us to make DOC/RTF the default
one, quite honestly. However, it's possible for users
to make any file format the default one via editing a
single line in their preferences schema. It is also
possible for any distributor of AbiWord to make a
similar change by changing a single line in the
AbiWord source. Ximian is doing this with its version
of OpenOffice, for example, and it makes a lot of
sense for them to do so.
Almost every document format is a dump of the
applications internal state to some large extent. In
this respect, Abi is no different from any other app
with a serializable internal state.
Finally, our inport/export "filters" don't take an
AbiWord file and do something akin to an XSLT
transformation on them. They all serialize AbiWord's
internal state (Piece Table). Some filters do it
better than others. Not all file formats are created
equal. Only one of them will/can ever be perfect at
serializing/deserializing the AbiWord Piece Table, and
that is the ABW filter. And perfection is something
that should be strived for. Dataloss is simply
unacceptable.
Dom
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