> We've done a bunch of whiteboard work, and have a pretty good idea where
> we're likely to start. However, none of us are familiar with how Word
> stores and represents tables in their file format, so that might be a useful
> design point.
The Word 97 file format is not a good thing to base anything on.
Whoever created this HAD to be on acid at the time. There can be no other
explanation.
Here's a little excerpt from MSDN concerning this beast:
The SEP for a particular section may be constructed if a CP of a
character in that section is known. First search the array of CPs in the
PLCSED for the index of the largest CP that is less than or equal to the
CP of the character. Use this index to locate the SED in the plcfsed
which describes the section. The FC stored in the SED is the offset from
the beginning of the Word file at which the SEPX is stored. If the
stored FC is equal to 0xFFFFFFFF, then the SEP for the section is
exactly equal to the standard SEP (see SEP structure definition)
Otherwise, read the SEPX into memory and create a copy of the standard
SEP. Finally, apply the sprms stored in the SEPX to the standard SEP to
produce the SEP for a section.
Microsoft is using more than their share of TLA's. Somebody ought to bring
that up in the antitrust suit.
Anyway, they seem to be storing their tables first by using
low-numbered ASCII characters to define cell and row breaks, then another
table of modifier information is used to describe cells and rows more
thoroughly. Of course, that's just what I got from my first examination of
their 500K explanation. I imagine that whatever ideas you've come up with
so far would be far better.
btw, if you want this document I'm looking at, I got it off of
www.wotsit.org.
Justin Bradford
justin@ukans.edu