Fridrich Strba

The Document Liberation Project has already developed a dozen of import libraries which have been integrated by software such as: Abiword, Calligra, CorelDRAW File Viewer, Inkscape, LibreOffice and Scribus. Besides short overview of motivations behind the project creation, this lecture will present the technical details of the framework used by the Document Liberation Project, as well as the different home-brewed introspection tools that we use. This are all free software tools that can be of use for wide range of other FLOSS projects.

What is new in the file-format coverage within LibreOffice? Focusing on new improved APIs which will land in LibreOffice 4.3, encouraging details about the growth of filter-writing community.

The talk will focus on the new import filters that entered LibreOffice since last FOSDEM. We will also speak about two new libraries with improved APIs that help filter-writers to generate different flavours of ODF (ODG, ODP, ODS and ODT) in a simplified way. The tools used for reverse-engineering and introspection of files will be also presented.

Since the Google Summer of Code, in collaboration with re-lab, LibreOffice community started to open to the broader free-software ecosystem several proprietary file-formats. This talk will present the libraries for parsing Visio (libvisio), CorelDraw (libcdr) or MS Publisher (libmspub) documents that are currently used by several free-software projects. The talk will focus on interesting details of reverse-engineering, and explain our method of "incremental" reverse-engineering which allowed us to open the file-formats of all CorelDraw versions. The same method is currently used to open the file-formats of all remaining versions of MS Visio. The talk will also present some of the introspection tools we develop and use. Those tools are free-software and their use goes beyond the reverse-engineering work.

A 45 (or less) minutes session dedicated on explaining how we proceeded in writing our Visio import filter and showing a methodology how to write an import filter for LibreOffice efficiently. Part of the session will be dedicated to get interested developers started. If you want to join our exciting journey, this is the door wide open for you into our community.