[odf-discuss] Smart package manager

[Daniel Carrera]

Hi Peter,

On Thu, 2007-04-01 at 23:18 +0100, Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> FWIW, I would be willing to offer some help on the Debian/Ubuntu side
> of things (e.g. testing the installation of the .deb on different versions
> of Debian and Ubuntu).

Thanks. I run Ubuntu myself, but only on one computer, and only Dapper.

> I am not experienced enough at this time to make .deb packages
> myself (interested though ;-)

I've made debs before, but I don't remember how :)  I'm sure I'll figure
it out again.


> I also offer to help in testing of the functionality of the viewer. E.g. I
> reported earlier in an irc to Daniel that converting a .odp file resulted in
> quite poor results (most of the colours and formatting of a quite simple
> slide was not correctly viewed).

I remember. It just occurred to me that what you saw was this issue:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=72134

Essentially, when OOo makes a .odp it doesn't indicate the fact that by
default all objects should be filled "solid". The OOo developers don't
think that this is against the spec. I'm not sure I agree with their
reading, but in any event, the solution is straight forward: We'll
update our XSLT to detect documents made in OOo and default to solid
fill.

> If you wish, I can start contributing specific reports to a bug tracking
> system (but difficult to isolate the problems, since the deviations
> between the original and the result seem to be quite gross in certain
> cases).

I know you are interested in a high-quality viewer. I've asked Inge
Wallin to prepare a short-but-technical proposal for the "version 2.0"
of the ODF viewer. We talked about it on IRC, but for everyone's
benefit: the idea is to take KOffice 2.0 (currently in development) and
essentially trim it down into a light-weight ODF viewer.

What Inge and others are doing right now is preparing a list of tasks
that need to be done (e.g. remove this library, replace that component,
etc). We'll also a better estimate of how many people and how much time
it would take to complete the project. Right now all we have is
"probably by the end of the summer".

I discussed this with Inge, and this project has several neat benefits:

* We get the Windows and Mac OS X ports almost for free (as KOffice 2.0
is due to run on those platforms).

* It's easy to use this to produce an odf2pdf converter. A lot of people
who are not interested in a viewer are interested in PDF conversion.

* We can get a C++ ODF library almost for free.

In any event, with luck, our sponsor will like this project and will
fund it. We can also try to get a few companies interested (companies
who may be interested in odf2pdf).

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
Infinite bottles of beer on the wall.
Infinite bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around.
Infinite bottles of beer on the wall.

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