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I just posted a question on the OpenOffice XML developer's mailing list. Before I posted the question, I wrote Steve Parker with a similar question. Steve Parker, who has been playing around with the OpenOffice document formats and who has been kind enough to share his wisdom, quickly responded! Thanks, Steve!
Here's what I posted on the developer's list:
Hello,
Although I'm new to using OpenOffice and developing for OpenOffice, I'm quite excited about its potential, especially its use of XML document formats. I have a number of projects in mind, but let me talk about one in this email.
*The Goal*
Write a Python or Java library that will generate a OpenOffice presentation from scratch that represents a simple photo-album slide show. That is, I want to create the appropriate XML documents (content.xml, styles.xml, etc), package up in a zip file with the appropriate binaries (e.g., image files). I do NOT want to have to access the OO APIs.
*Why am I doing this?*
I want to let my users gather images from various sources (their own pictures, from digital repositories, etc), sequence and annotate the images, and keep track of some metadata of the images -- and then package up the images, annotations, and metadata into an OO presentation file that the user can then use to further customize the presentation. Users are often assembling by hand presentation based on images. I'm building a tool to help automate the process.
*What I'm using?*
OpenOffice 1.1 Beta on a Win2K Professional SP3 machine
*What I've been trying:*
I've been trying to figure out the "hello world" of an OpenOffice presentation file by generating the simplest possible XML documents that will be useful.
The first thing I did was to create an empty presentation, save the file (empty.sxi), and then unzip empty.sxi to a directory. What I found are files that are mentioned in such tutorials as Uche Ogbuji's helpful tutorial on the OO XML format: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think15/?dwzone=xml
I looked through the various files and found them to be relatively simple (for what the document format has to do) -- but more complicated than I would like for what I'm trying to accomplish. That is, if I want to generate XML to feed into OO, do I actually need to include all the files and all the information found in empty.xsi?
To answer that question, I've taken two approaches:
1) Incrementally add new pages and elements to the OO presentation, save the presentation, and look at changes in the xml files. Figure out what is constant and account for what changes. I've made some progress working this way, but it's a bit laborious. The problem is that it's not obvious what data are necessary and what's not.
2) Download the OpenOffice DTD and use a tool like XMLSpy (a validating XML authoring tool) to generate and author the simplest valid OO documents, zip them up, and then feed them to OO to see what happens.
What I've discovered so far is that I can generate documents that are valid according to the DTD but which OO doesn't seem to handle properly. For example, I wrote the following content.xml (which XMLSpy says is valid):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--Sample XML file generated by XMLSPY v5 rel. 3 U (http://www.xmlspy.com)-->
<!DOCTYPE office:document-content PUBLIC "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD OfficeDocument 1.0//EN" "office.dtd">
<office:document-content office:class="presentation">
<office:body>
<draw:page draw:name="Title Page" draw:master-page-name="Default">
<draw:text-box>
<text:p>Hello world!</text:p>
</draw:text-box>
</draw:page>
</office:body>
</office:document-content>
compressed it and fed the package (which has no other files) into OO . No complaints from OO -- but also no indication that OO recognized my naming the first slide "Title Page" or that I'm trying to stick in the words "Hello world!" into the slide.
My tentative conclusion is that just because a document is VALID according to the OO DTD doesn't mean that OO will do anything useful with it.
NOTE: I have been avoiding reading the OpenOffice.org XML File Format document (http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification.pdf ) because I've been hoping for a shorter, more-see-what-OO-does-without-reading-too-much Perhaps that's what I to do!
Questions:
1) Am I on the right track in my approach to write simple XML that OO will do something useful with?
2) Am I right to conclude that generating valide OO documents is not sufficient to generate a file that would be useful for OO?
3) What is the simplest set of XML documents (content.xml, styles.xml, etc) that will display "Hello world!" in a OO Presentation? That is, what elements comprise the absolute mininal OO document? For instance, Steve Parker (http://steve-parker.org/c/openoffice.org/xml.shtml ) worked out the simplest table-generating XML. I find that very useful. IMHO, we need more simplest versions of XML documented.
4) Are there any software tools to test whether a OO document is "useful" as input for OO? I think that I'm generating "valid" documents -- but valid docs aren't necessarily useful, it seems.
Thank you very much in advance. Sorry if these are totally newbie questions.
-Raymond
Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/2/03; 11:17:07 AM
from the Web Technology dept.
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Wednesday, April 2, 2003