Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tassilo Horn writes:

 > My concern was converting ODF to some more human-editable format like
 > LaTeX or DocBook.

Why not convert ODF to some more human-editable format like "ODF with
all the junk not displayed"?  (Aside from how slow it is.)

So, like, if it's REALLY all one line OR ODF DTDs don't care about
whitespace outside of (P)CDATA, add linebreaks and indentation where
ever you feel like it, and you can remove it at save time.  If not,
you'll have to be more careful about those linebreaks and other added
whitespace, but I'm sure some device can be found to mark them
reliably so they can be removed at save time (maybe even a text
property).  Save any embedded junk out to a file and replace it with
an entity or alternatively some sort of link element in an
emacscanthandlethiscruft namespace.  You know, like the way VM and
Gnus represent MIME attachments with "buttons" in the buffer.

The more stuff Emacs can't handle, the more stuff ends up replaced by
a short placeholder and the faster Emacs goes.  You can't lose! :-)

 > And here, converting forth and back has a high potential to lead to
 > data loss for things the converters cannot handle, like
 > OpenDocument spreadsheets embedded in text documents.

Sure.  So don't convert, fix the display of the XML.