lpOD 0.8 is released

lpOD 0.8 has just been released, together with its documentation. You can download lpOD 0.8 here.

lpOD -- languages & platforms OpenDocument.
Definition of a Free Software API implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 standard.
Development, for higher level use cases, in Python, Perl and Ruby languages.
of a top-down oriented API.

• The architecture design is complete.
• The functional lpOD coverage is 90% complete.
• Only Python implementation is available (80% complete), and serves as the  reference implementation
• This release starts providing command-line tools for introspection and manipulation.
• The documentation is now online http://docs.lpod-project.org
• Cookbooks provide ready-to-use examples of the API for ODT, ODS and ODP (tables, tocs, notes, images frames, slides transitions, shapes, ... )

Python Implementation

Low-level API

• All types of styles are supported in the low-level API.
• Text search and replace API is added
• Basic shapes can be created: ellipse and circle, rectangle and square, and line.
• Adding non ODF resources (e.g. images, pdf, ...) in documents
• A Virtual File System (VFS) layer handles grabbing document from HTTP and FTP.
• After starting with the libxml2 Python wrapper, switched to lxml for both speed and ease of use.

High-level API

• Template are provided, with empty body, i.e. the ODT template has no paragraph, the ODS template has no table and the ODP template has no draw page.
• A document can grab styles from another document to merge them with its own ones.
• A specific API is available on paragraphs to insert notes and annotation.
• A specific API is available for tables to abstract the XML model, e.g. you can access cell "C3" without knowning the storage.
• Tables can be created from and exported to CSV.
• The full API to metadata is available. Only RDF would be missing.
• The navigation API no longer use a context element. The element itself is the navigation API.

Command-line Utilities

• The lpod-show.py tool dumps a textual representation of the content. It can also dump the latter, style information and metadata list in a directory.
• The lpod-meta.py introspection tool can list and edit metadata of the document.
• The lpod-merge.py tool can merge documents of the same type. ODT, ODP, ODS and CSV and supported for now.
• The lpod-highlight.py tool can apply a style on a text pattern. The default style is overlining as if you were using a yellow highlighter pen.

Statistics: from v0.7 to v0.8