Re: Word 97 stuff

Caolan McNamara (Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie)
Mon, 15 Feb 1999 11:11:29 -0000 (GMT)


On 14-Feb-99 Justin Bradford wrote:
>On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Paul Rohr wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
<chomp>
>
>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.

the worst thing about the MS format is the fast saved stuff, with that in there
everything becomes much more difficult, tables + fastsaved mode is pretty
much a nightmare. The MS format doesnt really define a table in advance of
being of a certain height and number of rows, it just says that a table is
coming up, and then each row has the length of each cell specified in it. so
you can look at MS tables of consisting of independant rows that just happen
to be underneath eachother, and if cells line up under eachother, thats just
a concidence. Completely unlike html tables for instance, so if you intend to
have a table format where the number of rows, and cell divisions is known in
advance you'll have to parse that section of the word document twice, something
that i intend to do for mswordview, but havent gotten around to, i just close
the html table, and start another one if i detect that the no of cells, or the
width of cells has changed from one row to the other, nasty eh ?

ive a load of other fun things that happen in the word format for your amusement
as well.

i still intend to make the mswordview source into a library that can be used
with abiword etc, but as im pretty snowed under, definitely dont wait on me :-)

C.

>
>btw, if you want this document I'm looking at, I got it off of
>www.wotsit.org.
>
>
>Justin Bradford
>justin@ukans.edu

Real Life: Caolan McNamara * Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie * Phone: +353-61-202699
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan * Sig: an oblique strategy
Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistancy



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