Hi Ryan, I've been mostly alternating between learning about the Word format, reading through your code and attempting to tap out the FIB (sadly I got 1/4 of the way through it before a corrupt copy of xscreensaver crashed me out.
So I started thinking... gee Ryan's out there in space (no pun intended ;-) ), he just donated some code and there I am doing things to it without explaining anything and he's wondering "gee what do I do now?" and wondering what a big jerk I am ;-). So I thought I'd check in and try and involve anyone else interested in the development of HDF. Take a look at the Vision for 2.0... that's the general plan. I'd like to get us to where we can create an abstract low level and high level data model for HDF. Next release we'll work on integrating into Cocoon or maybe FOP (the XML parts), or maybe if Ken is super bored one day he might do that for us ;-). In reading the word document you have the luxury of skipping all of the useless fields, we'll need to pay attention to those fields in order to write the word documents out. So I'm working on creating "types" for each of those binary structures based on your code and any other information I find. We can do this a number of ways, I'm just currently typing out the private member variables, from there we'll need to create getters and setters. Glen has a "record generator" he developed for HSSF. If he's willing to give us a hand, maybe we should consider using it or adapting it to let us describe via XML and generate these structures. Once we get the low level structures, the first goal should be to read in a very simple doc and write it back out. Once we get there, start working on a basic high level API (using familiar document objects like Document, Page, Paragraph etc etc rather then those nasty four letter abbreviations). How do you feel about what I've started on (other than not being so sure you want to type field_x_ before everything)? What do you want to do? Is there anything you don't like? Would anyone out there like to lend a hand? At the moment, the biggest thing we need it to create the types so we can start trying to fill them and create something like org.apache.poi.hssf.dev.biffviewer to debug our understanding.. Any thoughts from anyone? Am I leaving anyone out? Thanks, Andy -- http://www.superlinksoftware.com http://jakarta.apache.org - port of Excel/Word/OLE 2 Compound Document format to java http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4487555.html - fix java generics! The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. -Ambassador Kosh
