I was thinking, rather than putting a whole lot of effort into writing filters,
why not write a simple description language for converting files. (Or even use
part of an existing one, eg. based on the regex library)
That would provide a few benefits:
- It will (hopefully) take all of the C or C++ fluff out of writing a
filter, and provide a more suitable language for writing filters in.
- It will take code out of the binary, making a filter nothing more than
a config file.
- It has the possibility of becoming an import format standard (especially with
GPLed code), which will mean more/better filters from users of other projects.
I don't think speed is much of an issue when importing a document, as usually
it is fast enough on it's own.
But, then again, I don't know how you'd tackle the extremely binary file
formats with embedded objects in them :(
-- -- Michael Samuel <michael@surfnetcity.com.au>