[Libreoffice] MSO binary formats

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 09:33 -0700, Andy Brown wrote:
> Found an interesting link in users mailing list.  Doing some research I 
> came across [1].

Yes.  It's been there for at least several years.  This is old news, in
fact.

>   At first glance this would seem to permit anyone to 
> use the Microsoft binary formats without any problem.  For any legal 
> types, is this in fact true?  If so to the developers how much work 
> would be involved to bring LibreOffice in line with the published formats?

Having the file format spec available alone doesn't magically implement
all sorts of missing core features that are needed to inter-operate with
MS Office.  In fact, the hardest part is not dealing with the file
format, but to implement the core features that are required to preserve
data stored in the file format to improve round-tripping with MS Office.

Case in point, we were just discussing earlier about Smart art
functionality.  How the smart art data are stored in the file format is
well documented and is available publicly, but we still can't
inter-operate this feature because we lack this functionality in the
core.

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida at novell.com>