Re: imho

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Lars Clausen wrote:

> > On Fri, 6 Jun 2003 HSchuetze@snt-ag.de wrote:
> >
> >> >lines.  I think that's what you want.  Any idea how it could be made
> >> >more obvious?
> >
> >> You understand me correct. i havn't seen that. its nice, and exaclty
> >> what i want.  thanx.
> >
> >> Are they are plans for an Microsoft Office Integration???
> >
> > OLE or Visio support would be very difficult.
> > Visio support is about as likely as a very unlikely thing from the planet
> > unpossible*.
>
> To clarify a little:  The Visio format is a closely guarded secret that
> very little progress has been made towards reverse engineering.  The XML
> output of Visio 2003 is slightly more promising, though I've heard rumours

Saying a Microsoft program produces XML is only marginally more
helpful than saying it produces ASCII.
XML is no use if you dont have the schema and cant figure out what it
means, or if it is embedded full of meaningless MIME encoded binar
chunks.

The most interesting approach I have seen to getting data out of Visio is
to script Visio to batch convert all your files to a format such as WMF
and work with them.

I may as well use this talk of Integration with Office as an excuse to say
I have been using OpenOffice.org 1.1 a lot recently and the more I use it
the more I like it.  It is great that the file format is being
standardised by the OASIS group.  I would really really like to have
better integration between Dia and OpenOffice, having manually converted
an OpenOffice.org exported SVG file to a Dia Shape File I am particularly
interested in making that process easier for myself next time I get the
crazy idea to try it.  (must motivate myself to do something about it!)

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/