[Libreoffice] MSO binary formats

[Andy Brown]

Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> 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

Thanks for the reply, Kohei.  No being a programmer this what I was 
looking for.  I realise that it is easy to sit on the sidelines, so to 
speak, and complain about things.  I am only trying to understand the 
overall picture so that I know why things work or do not work.  Your 
explanation is understandable and easy to pass on.

Thanks again,
Andy