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I once worked with this insane genius who reverse-engineered DOC and PST by bit-banging the files in Visual Basic. Once I mentioned the compound document format
by flomo 10y ago
I once worked with this insane genius who reverse-engineered DOC and PST by bit-banging the files in Visual Basic. Once I mentioned the compound document format and he was puzzled for a second and then shrugged "I guess that's what that was". He clearly hadn't read any of what little documentation existed. He was the complete self-taught lone hacker type, his code had zero organization and was only understandable to him, but when it came down to it, it mostly worked and was a huge competitive advantage, for a while. I was hired to ship the web frontend, the backend document pipeline was solely his baby. Eventually MS shipped a patch to Office 2003 so that save as HTML mostly worked as expected and there was no longer an advantage in parsing the binary files.
- anovikov 10y agoProbably not with me. I never really worked with Visual Basic, that stuff was done in C++. And for Word, we used the available docs and yes we knew that it was a compound file as an outer shell (while we wrote our own fault-tolerant parser for it, which worked around damaged pieces whenever possible, while initial development was done by using intact files and using the Docfile API). The devil was deeper, the format of document stream and formatting stream was quite complicated, and documentation was very outdated and lacking detail. Extracting just the text was easy - simply go through plcfpcd and extract positions of pieces and their encoding (ASCII or Unicode), convert all to unicode and print to standard output. Extracting formatting (we used RTF for output) was crazy. PST was indeed much, much harder to do, it was a crazy effort which took about a man-year and it was all done by hand. And we never had web frontend for it, at least not on my watch (i left in 2007)