Re: [office] some answers regarding drawing comments

[Chris Nokleberg <cnokleberg@tonicsystems.com>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 10:10:44AM +0800, Zhi Yu Yue wrote:
> I also think that, from the standard's point of view, the definition
> of each command should not have conflict with the general rule
> except that we have strong reason to do that.

I agree with that.

> In this case, I am not sure if VML or other spec has proposition on
> the tangent.

It is not in the VML spec, but that is not saying much, because it is
not really a specification--just a "Note", and really bad in any case.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML

However, the VML implementation as built into Office and IE does use
alternating tangents.

> If no, I suggest to change the description by using consistent
> tangent. It is consistent with other commands (such as lineto, arc,
> and so on) and will not cause any backward interoperability problem
> with ODF1.0.

I'm fine with that, but I just want everyone to be clear that if
OpenOffice were to change their code to comply with the clarified
spec, it *will* break some existing documents. 

I did a quick run through the custom shapes in OpenOffice and there
are at least eight shapes affected. These all have "X" or "Y" commands
with more than one point:
 
  flowchart-delay
  flowchart-direct-access-storage
  flowchart-display
  flowchart-magnetic-disk
  flowchart-stored-data
  flowchart-terminator
  horizontal-scroll
  vertical-scroll

I can send an example ODP file to anyone who wants it.

For this issue and the possible change of using degrees for
draw:transform, I suggest adding some way that implementations can
determine which version of ODF a document uses. For example, a
mandatory "version" attribute on the root would suffice. I suppose
using namespace with an updated version suffix for changed attributes
and elements would work too, although that would be harder on
implementors.

Chris