Re: [office-comment] Public Comment

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

comment-form@oasis-open.org wrote:
> Comment from: matthias_mosimann@gmx.net
> Maybe here is someone, who can answer my question. Is there any 
> possibility to process the XML Files which OO2 produce
 > (i.e. *.sxw and so on) outside from OO2

Hi - Quick clarification.  This mailing list is _NOT_
about OpenOffice.org or any other specific product.
It's about a document format, OpenDocument.   OpenDocument, like HTML,
can be read & written by many applications.  If you have a
product-specific question, you should go to a mailing list where
that specific product is discussed.

> to a pdf (html, tex, or whatelse)?   (I.E. with
> fop, xalan, xerces, xsltproc, saxon, some other xslt engines)? What do I 
> know and what do I need for do that?

Of course.  OpenDocument is (typically compressed) XML, so you
simply uncompress it & use any transformation process you wish to
translate it into PDF (or whatever).

Some languages, like XSLT, are designed to process XML,
and they're implemented by many products.  But the WHOLE POINT
of the open license of OpenDocument is that you can use
ANY TOOL YOU WANT to process the material ANY WAY YOU WANT.
It's YOUR data!  So the answer is... whatever you want to use!!

I believe all full office suites that take OpenDocument can
already generate HTML and Postscript at least; several
(like OpenOffice.org) can generate PDF, and the rest can generate
Postscript which can then be turned into PDF.  So if those are
your needs, you might find it easier to use existing products
than to build your own.  But those aren't the only ways you can
process the data, and for other purposes (like data extraction)
you can use anything you want.  There are even some Perl libraries
on CPAN to generate OpenDocument files and extract information from
them, and I know there are Java libraries available too.
EVERYONE can process XML, and that's all you need.

--- David A. Wheeler