What’s In An ODF File?
Friday, 2007-January-12
3Monkeys is doing a series where they will look inside of file formats to describe them. The article seems quite interesting. This is a follow-on from an earlier comparison of file sizes.
As you can see all four subdocuments as specified in the specification are present as well as several other files. In particular META-INF/manifest.xml list the contents of the package, including information such as full path and type.
This article is a good introduction to the XML files and other components found in a .odt word processing document file. For someone who is interested in creating applications that manipulate that format, this kind of knowledge is essential.
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3Monkeys | Saturday, 2007-January-13 at 10:30
The primary reason for me doing this series of articles, is to explore the differences between OpenOffice and the ODT format with Microsoft and the DOC format. Since we do not have access to the DOC specification, I am exposing the readers to ODF and hopefully will be able to infer some things about the DOC format. I plan to follow all of this up with some comparisons to DOCX this spring.