[Clipart] Clipart Packages for Open Clipart

[Adrian Sutton]

On 17 May 2009, at 23:23, Michael Krnac wrote:

> Work for you Aaron and Adrian :)
>
> It would be cool to provide Packages that can be easily imported to  
> Open Office.
> This work have some steps.
>
> Find out how to import Cliparts into OO
> Find out how the file structur have to be.
> Write a script to package the Cliparts on this way
> Try to import metadata from the OCAL to this OO-Package
> It would be cool if you guys can start with this.

(Correct me if you know I'm wrong on any of this - I don't use Open  
Office so have been starting completely from scratch and had to  
believe what I read on the internet...)

I've done some looking into this and Open Office really has lousy  
support for clip art galleries.  It also has pretty lousy support for  
SVG (via an optional component) but the PNG versions would be a good  
starting point at least.

Essentially, Open Office doesn't really support any metadata on  
clipart beyond just grouping them into separate galleries (think  
folders). So we'd need to build a gallery of animals, one for people,  
one for buildings etc.  That's doable though, but not going to  
leverage most of the metadata that open clipart is collecting.

There are however a few key problems with distributing galleries in  
open office:

1. You need to create a .sdg, .sdv and .thm file to go with it.  These  
are proprietary binary files and there's very little tooling or  
documentation on them. The easiest way to build them is to use Open  
Office itself to create a gallery and then copy the resulting files out.

2. Those files are named sgXXX.sdg where XXX is a number that needs to  
be unique.  Managing installs where the filename might not be unique  
and also managing upgrades needs to be added to the scope.

Once you get over those issues, the package format is a pretty simple  
zip file but with a .oxt extension and it contains a few XML files to  
give details.

Interestingly there are prebuilt packages for Mandriva and Ubuntu  
(openclipart-openoffice.org).  Anyone know where these came from as  
they seem to be the best starting point?

Cheers,

Adrian Sutton
http://www.symphonious.net


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