Re: Not reinventing the wheel ...

Daniel O'Donnell <[email protected]> was heard to say:

> Or, since wordprocessors are becoming more XML based, if it couldn't be
> extended to include them. An idea I had while working on the coding of
> the php this summer--about to be revived--was extending it to cover open

                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ oh yes please

> office: read the file in, unzip, change, and close back up. I don't know
> enough about the newer Word formats to say how it might work there.
>

Might be doable, but OpenOffice has a fairly active subproject trying to improve
bibliography support:

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/index.html

If they indeed settle on CiteProc as a bibliography formatting tool, RefDB could
serve as a data source via a SRW interface. This could be written and glued on
in a reasonable amount of time.

As far as Word XML is concerned, the stuff must be awful - see a comparison
here:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125144611543

I've seen in another story that M$ is proud of being able to encode all approx.
400 possibilities to render a frame border in Word, but this comes at a price -
MSXML is not readable for humans, and accordingly hard to program for.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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