[Libreoffice] MSO binary formats

[Jonathan Aquilina]

Kohei

This I think is what keeps alot of people away from open source. That 
has what has kept me off OOO and LO, This is something that should 
really be worked on, and something that would really give a boost to LO 
in the long term, as it was never something that OOo addressed.

On 21/04/2011 18:41, 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
>