From: Jody Goldberg (jody_at_gnome.org)
Date: Fri Nov 07 2003 - 14:22:16 EST
On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 02:13:40PM +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
> Well this is where my own bias as a bottom-up developer comes in to
> play. I need to see how the details will work before I can get the big
> picture :-)
I'll make a very strong suggestion that you _start_ with the
powerpoint file format and importer and build the application around
that.
As developers we have lots of control over the application which
makes polishing that relatively straight forward. The key to user
adoption is getting control over import and export to the
predominant formats, which boils down to ppt. On the plus side,
there is lots of code there to share with gnumeric (the escher
parser). On the down side, at best, it will be a morass of
partially documented binary goo. Make your lives simpler and
minimize the impedance mismatches between your data structures and
theirs. Aiming to be better than MS Powerpoint is an excellent
idea, but it will be a hell of alot easier to be a superset of it,
than to just be different.
On the implementation side I'd really love to see as many of the
drawing objects implemented in the goffice layer. We already have
some importers for the basics in gnumeric, and frankly handling all
the pref dialogs and escher import/export is a large expensive job.
We should only do it once. There are 3 copies (at least I think
its only 3) of that subsystem in OOo, lets not make the same
mistake.
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