Re: [boost] [gsoc] Suggestions on Proposal for Boost Document Library Project

Subject: Re: [boost] [gsoc] Suggestions on Proposal for Boost Document Library Project
From: Stefan Seefeld (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-18 11:07:40

Anurag,

On 18/03/15 09:59 AM, Anurag Ghosh wrote:
> Hello Everyone
>
> I'm Anurag Ghosh, a 2nd year undergraduate student studying in
> IIIT-Hyderabad, India and I'm interested in making the Boost Document
> Library as a part of the Google Summer of Code 2015 Program.
>
> My proposal document can be viewed at
> https://github.com/anuragxel/boost-generic-document-library/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code-2015-Proposal-for-Boost-Document-Library-Development
>
> Kindly provide me with comments on the project proposal, as it may seem I
> have missed out on something or the other. I'm hopeful that a discussion
> would be very helpful in enriching my proposal.

Having worked a fair bit with documents, and in particular programmatic
processing of documents, I believe I can relate to the appeal to a
high-level API to facilitate the manipulation of such documents.

However, I think this requires a bit more thought. For one, I find your
proposal hugely ambitious. In other words, I have doubts that you can
achieve all the things you propose in a short period as this.
Second, I don't think an interface to existing office suites is the
right approach to the problem. Rather, I would suggest something based
on existing standard technologies such as XML (and DocBook in
particular), to support the manipulation of structured documents.

Note that last year we had a GSoC project to advance the state of a
(proposed) Boost.XML library (which I mentored). I believe it's straight
forward to build higher-level APIs on top of that to manipulate
documents on a more "semantic" level, and then leave it to the various
office suites to handle the import & export the chosen format (Libre-
and Open-Office already support DocBook). See
https://github.com/stefanseefeld/boost.xml.

Regards,

        Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...