What is AODL?
AODL is free .net library resp. framework for simply generating documents in
the OpenDocument within your .net products.
Where can i download AODL?
You can download the latest release from sourceforge.net
projectsite.
What is the OpenDocument format?
The OpenDocument is a office document format. Which describe their
content and style in xml files. More information about the OpenDocument xml
schema will be found at the official site which yound
here.
Which Office Suites Support the OpenDocument format? There
are different poplular Office Suites with OpenDocument support. The most
populars are OpenOffice since
Vers. 2.0 and
Star Office since Vers. 8 . Additional
AbiWord, KOffice,
Scribus, Textmarker and
WordPerfect (Plan to support OpenDocument june/2006).
Can i use AODL within my commercial products?
Yes, of course. AODL is published under the LGPL (Lesser Genral Public
License) which let all you use AODL in every form.
Must be OpenOffice or any other Office Suite installed on
my developing PC?
No, there is no need of an installation of OpenOffice or any other Office Suite on
your develop PC, but it will be necessary if want to test the generated
OpenDocuments.
From AODL version 1.0.4.0 on it's planned to support loading and printing your
generated OpenDocuments within OpenOffice. If you wan't to use this features it
will be needfull if OpenOffice is installed to debug your applications.
Must be OpenOffice or any other Office Suites installed on the
end users PC?
No, there is no need of an installation of OpenOffice or any other Office
Suites on the end user pc's. Only if your application will use the features to
load and print OpenDocuments via OpenOffice it has to be installed. (This
features will be available in version 1.0.4.0 (The next upcoming release)).
Which parts of the OpenDocument formats are currently supported
by AODL?
For complete list of supported features of the different
versions have a look at the roadmap and
changelog.
Is the OpenDocument format supported within MS Office
products?
Currently not, but there are many discussions in several newsgroups if
the time comes where Microsoft will support OpenDocument. Up to know Microsoft
Office 2003 comes with their own
xml document format.
Canceld (This was the plan)
Because of the fact that AODL using the Mapping and the Facade Pattern to
handle the xml tags of the OpenDocument i think that i will extend AODL with an
OpenDocument to MS Office 2003 Xml converter.
(This is reality)
The Microsoft Office XML License seems to be incompatible with all existing
OpenSource license. In fact, i don't really understand this license and so i
currently won't write a MS Office Xml Exporter.
How can in integrate AODL into my .net Project?
AODL is a normal .net dll you only have to add the references to the
AODL dll and the ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll to your project and you're ready
to go ;)
Where could i get examples?
You will find a snippet section here. The
snippets show you how to use the common features of AODL within you
application.
Why should is use AODL to generate documents in the
OpenDocument format?
Because the xml schema for a document in a OpenDocument format is
very complex and it would be a lot time of searching for the right element and
attributes. Additional you will have write a lot code to realize that. If you
won't believe that have a look at the following example.
Code to create a OpenDocument text document with a simple paragraph. Using
AODL you only have to write the following code:
TextDocument td = new TextDocument();
td.New();
Paragraph p = new Paragraph(td, "P1");
//add text p.TextContent.Add(new SimpleText(p, "Hello"));
//Add the Paragraph td.Content.Add((IContent)p);
//Blank para td.Content.Add(new Paragraph(td,
ParentStyles.Standard.ToString()));
// new para p = new Paragraph(td, "P2");
p.TextContent.Add(new SimpleText(p, "Hello"));
td.Content.Add(p);
td.SaveTo("parablank.odt");
