How far can the LO file's contents be stretched?

[Michael Stahl]

On 06/02/12 22:30, Johannes Sixt wrote:
> Am 06.02.2012 10:39, schrieb Michael Meeks:
>>
>> On Sun, 2012-02-05 at 21:50 +0100, Johannes Sixt wrote:

>>> 3) Can the styles listed in an <office:automatic-styles> section be
>>> renamed? For example:
>>
>> 	I believe the names are arbitrary and can be replaced without problems;
>> of course - do you want to get a well defined order here based on some
>> hash of the attributes or somesuch ? if so, patches most welcome :-)
>>
>> 	Looking forward to seeing what you're up to :-)
> 
> So here's the full story. I want to keep software manuals in a git
> repository. We keep variants of the software+manuals in branches, and
> from time to time we want to merge the development progress into the
> branches. And that's where this fun task starts.
> 
> My first attempt to merge documents was to use the, well, "Merge
> documents" feature. But my self-built 3.5.0-rc2 (3a7ae48b) reports
> merely "Cannot merge documents". I think it cannot handle conflicting
> changes. [*]

i think merge document is probably based on compare documents, and last
i looked at that in Writer it was so horribly broken it would need years
to fix (being based on Writer's horrible redlining is just the start...).

> Now I'm exploring plan B: textual merging of the XML data. For this, I'm
> exploding the zip archive into a git tree so that I can use the git
> toolbox. Unfortunately, there are many textual conflicts because the
> automatic styles are numbered, and as styles come and go between
> document versions, many unnecessary conflicts arise at the point where
> the styles are used. To work it around, I would rename the styles based
> on a hash of the style definition and sort them (to be able to better
> merge the <automatic-styles> section).

fixing that would perhaps be a good idea; code is somewhere in the
"xmloff" module...

> But now that you mention flat ODF files (which I didn't know about
> before), I better change the plan and use that.

btw flat ODF has the same automatic style problem because it's actually
95% the same code

> .... does some tests ...
> 
> Ouch! I have some embeded LO Draw graphics (all converted from MS Word
> 2000 format). They are only displayed as a big pixelized plug, and are
> also exported into PDF as such, not the graphics proper. Although I can
> double-click and edit them in LO Draw. That's a show-stopper. It would
> be great if there were a simple solution for this.

flat ODF filters don't support all features of package-based ODF (which
is i guess the reason why OOo never shipped a flat ODF filter out of the
box); also your images and embedded objects will blow up considerably in
size due to base64 encoding.

> -- Hannes
> 
> [*] If you think that "Merge documents" should work, I can provide
> details what I did. I can also run a merge attempt in the debugger to
> observe what LO is doing, but I'm not prepared, yet, to fix the merge
> procedure.