On Sat, 11 Feb 2012, Stuart Rackham wrote:
Let us know when you're at the point where you think there are no major
AsciiDoc roadblocks to a workable odt backend and I'll start working on the
next AsciiDoc release.
The problem with the ODF backend is that there's a lot of room for
improvement in lots of areas. To name a few:
- the odt.conf makes some assumptions for my use-cases, since not
everything can be defined in a theme (eg. cover-page, some constructs,
...)
- complex tables are differently done in ODF than in DocBook or HTML,
especially styling them is done on a per-cell basis, so you basicly
need to know what sides of a cell needs a border to avoid having double
width borders in the center and style everything in advance
- in some cases the styling _does_ happen in the odt.conf and not in the
stylesheet, and since there's no way to cascade them properly and
override in the odt.conf, that makes it very hard
- the absence of a method to influence the stylesheet makes it hard to
customize, e.g. the document language is defined in the stylesheet too,
the header/footer content is defined in the stylesheet, ...
- some of the ODF specification we need fails in certain consumers (I
have now only tested on LibreOffice), I have reported crashes (all
fixed), native unencapsulated SVG support (fixed), incomplete
implementations (difficult) and representation issues (difficult)
- I need to test with more than just LibreOffice
- Some of the add-ons do not work as once would expect, e.g. some of the
image-generating add-ons create files on disk while they are not needed
when embedded
- Not everything from AsciiDoc syntax is currently
working/allowed/styled, mostly what I use is working, but what's hard
to do is e.g. defining bullets/numbering, annotations inside e.g. lists
etc... (we abuse sections for annotations now, so limited styling)
I don't know how other backends have done this in the past, both making it
feature complete and woking around the limitations of the specification.
You'd need an ODF expert in order to know what the best strategy is, en
document all of the limitations that are introduced.
I also still need to learn the new {blockname} macro and see in what cases
it would help my cause :-/ My current plan is to promote asciidoc-odf at
various conferences in order to draw a crowd helping to complete it.
So if you ask my opinion, don't wait for us with a release. A new AsciiDoc
release might even help, so I can merge your patch that relies on a new
release ;-)
Thanks for your interest !
--
-- dag wieers, [email protected], http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, [email protected], http://dagit.net/
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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