On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Andreas Säger <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Today my wife got her new Kindle which comes with a document viewer > based on Apache Freetype for the rendering job and Apache POI which is a > Java library to parse Microsoft documents. > It handles doc(x)/xls(x)/ppt(x) but no ODF. Although I am not deeply > involved in this project, I feel somewhat embarrassed and alarmed > because in the year 2012 the Apache foundation develops excellent tools > to process proprietary file formats but fails to offer anything > equivalent for the free and much simpler ODF standard. > Is my assumption correct that http://incubator.apache.org/odftoolkit/ > would be the remedy to solve that problem but due to a lack of > development resources it is not ready for the job? >
The ODF Toolkit is a Java library for manipulating ODF documents. A classic use would be document automation, e.g., taking a document template and filling in data from a database, to create a new ODF document. It does this all without any GUI, no OpenOffice required. It is not an editor, not a viewer. It has no rendering, layout or calculation logic. It operates directly on the document file. So ordinarily I'd say that this was not appropriate for a document viewer, certainly not without a layout engine. But on something like the Kindle, with relatively simple layout requirements, the ODF Toolkit would be analogous to POI, and would make the task far easier. If you search for it, you will find various solutions for converting ODF to EPub. But I have not seen something that does the same for Kindle's MOBI format. -Rob > Greetings, > Andreas Säger >
