3monkeys

Overview

In my last article, OpenOffice .odt Opened Up – Part 1: Overview, I discussed the overall package scheme for ODT documents, and pointed out that OpenOffice uses the subdocument form. In this article, I will be taking a closer look at two of simpler top level subdocuments of the four included in the specification. Specifically, we will be taking a closer look at the office:document-meta and office:document-settings elements.

As before, my test cases where produced with the following software:

• SuSE Linux 10.1
• OpenOffice 2.0.2.7.1
• zip 2.31 (March 8th 2005)

The original source document can be downloaded here oo_part1.odt, and in particular the two subdocuments under observation can be downloaded here meta.xml and settings.xml.

The office:document-meta element

The office:document-meta element provides metadata with respect to the document, such as, author, creation time and editing time, among other data. The metadata elements can be either pre-defined or user defined. Pre-defined elements should be respected and updated by the editing application. User defined elements provides a more generic way of storing and using metadata. Each user defined metadata element is compossed of a name, a type and a value. Supporting applications can access this information and display it to the user based on its type. Both pre-defined and user defined should be able to be referenced through appropriate document text fields.

The pre-defined metadata elements are largely based upon the metadata standards developed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (http://www.dublincore.org), thus many of the elements use the dc namespace.

There are 18 pre-defined metadata elements, these are listed below:

• meta:generator
• dc:title
• dc:description
• dc:subject
• dc:keyword – Can appear multiple times
• meta:initial-creator
• dc:creator – Last modifier
• meta:printed-by
• meta:creation-date – Format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
• dc:date – Last modification date, format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
• meta:print-date
• meta:template
• meta:auto-reload
• meta-hyperlink-behaviour
• dc:language – As defined by RFC3066, with ISO 639 language code and ISO 3166 country code
• meta:editing-cycles
• meta:editing-duration – Format PnYnMnDTnHnMnS
• meta:document-statistic – Can appear multiple times, ODT attributes below
  • meta:page-count
  • meta:table-count
  • meta:draw-count
  • meta:image-count
  • meta:ole-object-count
  • meta:paragraph-count
  • meta:word-count
  • meta:character-count
  • meta:row-count
  • meta:frame-count
  • meta:sentence-count
  • meta:syllable-count
  • meta:non-whitespace-character-count

As I suggested regarding the thumbnail image in a prior article, this information could easily be extracted and displayed to users of popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask. Additionally these services could allow the user to narrow their search based on certain criteria found in the metadata.

Provided here, meta.pl, is an example written in perl using the XML::Simple package that extracts the last editor, modification date, and page and word count. If anyone would like to contribute ports of this to another language feel free. If there is significant interest, I will cover XML::Simple or other XML packages or utilities.

The office:document-settings element

Next we take a look at the office:document-settings element. This element contains application settings that may impact thedocument. It does not caontain a complete set of application settings. Being application settings, there are no particular entries that are defined ih the ODF Specification. A office:document-settings element will contain one or more config:config-item-set elements, these elements will in turn contain config:config-item, config:config-item-set, config:config-item-map-named or config:config-item-map-indexed. The discovery of how each of these elements works with a particular application, such as OpenOffice.org Writer, is left as an exersise to the reader since they do not directly affect our goals of understanding ODF as it relates to Microsoft’s .doc format. Suffice it to say, the office:document-settings element is of little interest to all but an application developer.

What’s up next?

Next up we will investigate the significantly more interesting office:document-styles element. We will also learn some optimization techniques that we can apply to this element and perhaps discover a little of how it relates to thee office:document-content element.

Until next time,

-3Monkeys

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 11:11 pm and is filed under ODF, Open Source, Software, Standards, XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.