[documentliberation-discuss] Draft of blog post about DLP updates

Hi everyone,

I've written a post for the TDF Blog about recent DLP progress, plus a
call to action. I haven't published it yet, though -- the text is below
in case anyone wants to change/add anything. Thanks!


Updates from the Document Liberation Project

The <a href="http://www.documentliberation.org/";>Document Liberation
Project</a> (aka DLP) is working to free users and content creators from
vendor lock-in. To achieve this, it develops and maintains libraries for
reading documents in many different formats – including those generated
by proprietary software. To learn more about the DLP, <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSqU2Wp-neQ";>check our our short
video</a>.

In recent months, DLP developers have been working on updates and new
features, so read on for all the details.


QuarkXPress import filter

Lithuanian coder Alex Pantechovskis (who we <a
href="https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/09/26/document-liberation-project-interview-alex-pantechovskis/";>interviewed
last year</a>) is working with David Tardon on a filter to read
documents generated by the QuarkXPress desktop publishing application.
He's doing this as a Google Summer of Code project, and is making good
progress importing text boxes, shapes and other objects.

The image below shows an original QuarkXPress document on the left, and
how it is converted into the open and standardised <a
href="http://opendocumentformat.org";>OpenDocument Format</a> for use in
LibreOffice and other software:

http://i.imgur.com/4UtI882.png

Alex and David have implemented the filter in a library, libqxp, so that
many open source programs will be able to extract data from QuarkXPress
3.3 and 4.x files in the future.


PowerPoint and StarOffice

Meanwhile, Laurent Alonso has been improving a number of libraries for
better compatibility with legacy documents. For instance, in libmwaw he
has implemented an import filter for presentations created in Microsoft
PowerPoint 2 (Windows), PowerPoint 4 (Mac and Windows) and PowerPoint
for Windows 95. If you have old presentations in this format and need to
retrieve the main contents, this filter will help you out.

In addition, he has updated libstaroffice, which is a library used to
read files generated by StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice.org
and then LibreOffice – see <a
href="http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/libreoffice-timeline/";>our
timeline</a> for the full history). Thanks to Laurent's work, .sdc
spreadsheet files preserve more of their formatting when imported, while
.sda files created with StarOffice Impress are now converted as
presentations.


Give us a hand!

As you've seen, DLP is helping users and content creators to free their
data from old, legacy and proprietary formats. DLP libraries are used by
many well-known applications such as LibreOffice, Inkscape and Scribus,
so your contributions can help millions of people around the world.

And you don't have to be a developer! While code contributions are
always welcome, you can help us by reverse-engineering and documenting
file formats, or sending us sample documents to analyse and test against
the DLP libraries. Any help can really make a big difference, so <a
href="http://www.documentliberation.org/contribute/";>see this page</a>
to learn more. We look forward to meeting you!

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