5 ms·

Office97 was binary format, XML comed much latter as response to OpenOffice

auxym 9y ago
Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. From what I remember, the EU wanted to standardize an open document format, and had their eye set on OO ODF, as the most mature of those at the time. Microsoft put out their OXML format, gave out free patent grants, lobbied hard, and managed to get it into ISO. If you want some nightmares though, open an office XML file in a text editor some day.
- nxc18 9y ago
  I wrote a tool to convert pptx files to markdown. Using python it was maybe a 3 hour project. I'm sure some of the more nuanced formatting is a challenge, but the format really isn't bad and keeps the content quite manageable.
  - xyzxyz998 9y ago
    You're not going to leave us hanging, are you?
    - l1n 9y ago
      Not OP but it could be https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1
      - nxc18 9y ago
        That is in fact what I was referring to, although I don't think it should still be up. I wrote that and on a whim thought, "I'll make this a pip package," severely underestimating that task. The tool works but I never finished that packaging. The working source should be on github if you're interested.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- vetinari 9y ago
  > Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. They came with Office 2007. For Office 2003, there was a plugin that allowed to open the XML files, in a limited way.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    No, there was a separate XML format for 2003 before OOXML, called WordprocessingML. Basically nothing else ever used it, but later MS Office and LibreOffice still read it.
- wglb 9y ago
  If you want some nightmares though It is not really all that bad. The hardest part of pulling it all out and reassembling it into what you want is the shared strings aspect. It is really quite distinct from the memory dump of pre-xml doc/excel files.
  - pacaro 9y ago
    For real. On Palladium/NGSCB there was a strong effort to maintain correspondence between documentation and code, to the point that there was an effort to have header files be generated directly from the specs, which were Word docs. The biggest practical challenge was that the extractor had to instantiate Word just to read the text content of paragraphs with the specified style. This is not something that you want in your build pipeline if you can avoid it.
    - wglb 9y ago
      Ewwww. I woulda cobbled something together to suck the text out of them.
      - pacaro 9y ago
        Hahaha, me too, but the old Word format really is as bad as everyone says, and we were trying to build a system with formal correspondence from spec to code (and sometimes from spec to proof to code), so having a "cobbled" together something really didn't fit the model. The real problem was using word as our documentation format, but at Microsoft in the early oughts there really weren't many alternatives.
        wglb 9y ago
        Well, I do believe LaTeX was available. The cobble-together part, to be successful, would pull the text out reliably. And the format is readily documented, and Open/Libre office processes it as well. The code to do the extract might be ugly, but so long as it reliably produced the text in a CI/CD environment, that would be OK.
oniony 9y ago
Comed?

Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. From what I remember, the EU wanted to standardize an open document format, and had their eye set on OO ODF, as the most mature of those at the time. Microsoft put out their OXML format, gave out free patent grants, lobbied hard, and managed to get it into ISO. If you want some nightmares though, open an office XML file in a text editor some day.

nxc18 9y ago
I wrote a tool to convert pptx files to markdown. Using python it was maybe a 3 hour project. I'm sure some of the more nuanced formatting is a challenge, but the format really isn't bad and keeps the content quite manageable.
- xyzxyz998 9y ago
  You're not going to leave us hanging, are you?
  - l1n 9y ago
    Not OP but it could be https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1
    - nxc18 9y ago
      That is in fact what I was referring to, although I don't think it should still be up. I wrote that and on a whim thought, "I'll make this a pip package," severely underestimating that task. The tool works but I never finished that packaging. The working source should be on github if you're interested.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
vetinari 9y ago
> Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. They came with Office 2007. For Office 2003, there was a plugin that allowed to open the XML files, in a limited way.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  No, there was a separate XML format for 2003 before OOXML, called WordprocessingML. Basically nothing else ever used it, but later MS Office and LibreOffice still read it.
wglb 9y ago
If you want some nightmares though It is not really all that bad. The hardest part of pulling it all out and reassembling it into what you want is the shared strings aspect. It is really quite distinct from the memory dump of pre-xml doc/excel files.
- pacaro 9y ago
  For real. On Palladium/NGSCB there was a strong effort to maintain correspondence between documentation and code, to the point that there was an effort to have header files be generated directly from the specs, which were Word docs. The biggest practical challenge was that the extractor had to instantiate Word just to read the text content of paragraphs with the specified style. This is not something that you want in your build pipeline if you can avoid it.
  - wglb 9y ago
    Ewwww. I woulda cobbled something together to suck the text out of them.
    - pacaro 9y ago
      Hahaha, me too, but the old Word format really is as bad as everyone says, and we were trying to build a system with formal correspondence from spec to code (and sometimes from spec to proof to code), so having a "cobbled" together something really didn't fit the model. The real problem was using word as our documentation format, but at Microsoft in the early oughts there really weren't many alternatives.
      - wglb 9y ago
        Well, I do believe LaTeX was available. The cobble-together part, to be successful, would pull the text out reliably. And the format is readily documented, and Open/Libre office processes it as well. The code to do the extract might be ugly, but so long as it reliably produced the text in a CI/CD environment, that would be OK.

oniony 9y ago

Comed?