Details
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Improvement
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Status: Open
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Minor
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Resolution: Unresolved
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odfdom-0.8.6
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None
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None
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Operating System: All
Platform: All
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213
Description
This weekend I decided to experiment with text documents. Most of my work up until now has been focussed in the spreadsheet area.
I have the following observations.
Creating a rudimentary text document is easy (so long as all you want to do is create a document and put text into it with no style).
Reading text from a document however is very complex. In fact the API seems to give me so little help that frankly I might as well just unzip the ODT file and use my own XPath code to process it.
As far as I can see, to read a text doc all I can do is get a byte stream of the XML markup and/or use XPath expressions to walk the ODF XML tree. This is not good enough for a higher level API and requires me to know the ODF syntax.
The user should not need to understand the ODF XML grammar or even know about XPath expressions to do simple things like get the text from the second paragraph in the document.
I was really surprised to find the API so deficient in this area. I view this as a major gap.
Is there a plan to address this soon?
It seems a lot of effort is going in to fixing the lower level processing but frankly unless the toolkit makes the life of the average programmer much easier then it will not get much adoption.
I think this area needs to be enhanced very soon. For XML experts it is no big deal and yes I could write code using today's API but the average user of the toolkit should not have to be an XML or ODF expert.
I marked this as a P1 enhancement request as I think this is urgent.
Kelvin