Hi Johannes, On Sun, 2012-06-17 at 22:10 +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote: > I want to place a software manual under source control. It seems most > feasible to use a flat XML format, in particular, .fodt.
Yes - that's a good plan :-) > But I have some difficulties because when LO 3.5.4 opens a .fodt and > saves it again without making any changes, the resulting file changes > nevertheless. Right - this is a regular annoyance ! :-) > I'm writing a small tool that transforms the XML into a canonical format > so that only substantial changes remain. The question is: Which > transformations are allowed? Oh - so ... why write an external tool to do this, and not just fix it in LibreOffice ! ? :-) We'd be -very- interested in some patches that we can apply that will sort the automatic styles, and generate them with consistent naming in a sensible order :-) > (This seems to work so far.) The style rendering sounds sensible. > But there are other changes: > > - <office:meta> changes. It's not a problem, I don't care about this. Some level of sorting here might help too. > - <office:settings> changes. I don't know, yet, whether I mind or not. > > - The <draw:frame draw:z-index="251"> attribute changes. Can I just > replace the z-index with 1 or 2? What will happen? Odd :-) perhaps when we have smaller changes we can chase these oddnesses down better. > - The <text:list xml:id="list533178598"> changes. That xml:id does not > seem to be used anywhere. Can I just remove it? What will I lose? No idea; if it's unused just try removing it and see what happens. > - Measurements change. E.g. (just to pick one case), in > <style:graphic-properties> the draw:visible-area-width changes from > 6.088cm to 6.089cm. Is there a remedy to avoid changes of this kind? Ah; nasty, some rounding problem / internal representation issue - possibly again looking at the code we could do better here to make it more predictable; possibly using more precision we could do better (doubles instead of floats) ? > Any insights are welcome! So - the best place to fix this stuff is inside LibreOffice itself :-) then it is permanently fixed for everyone: you are not the only problem with this pain - soon we'll be using flat odf for our templates and will suffer the same way :-) The code to poke at is in: xmloff/ and sw/source/filter/xml/ It's not too hard to build libreoffice, checkout: http://www.libreoffice.org/developers-2/ Patches are very much more than welcome ! :-) Thanks ! Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice