On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Geoffroy Couprie <geo.couprie@gmail.com> wrote:

The old (97) Excel file format is a weird file system acting as a database. It is also used for doc, msi and cab files. The new format (xslx, docx, etc) is just a zipped bunch of xml files, so it's quite easy to parse :)

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Carla F. Griggio <carla.griggio@gmail.com> wrote:
Great!

That reminds me... would it be too hard to be able to export Excel files from Pharo? Or at least Open Office Spreadsheets?

That could be a project idea too.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:

Hi,

Good one, Nick. I can offer to be second mentor on this one as well.

Cheers,
Doru

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:32 PM, Nick Ager <nick.ager@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Janko,
>
> Here you go: 'ePUB Output for Pier Books'
>
> --------------
>
> Name: ePUB Output for Pier Books
> Level: Intermediate
> Possible mentor: Nick Ager
> Possible second mentor: Lukas Rengli
>
> Description
> Pier [1,2]�is�an�extensible�object-oriented content management system�that
> includes a book authoring engine. The book authoring engine has been used to
> document a number of Smalltalk based projects, most notable Seaside [3] as
> well as Moose [4]�and Pharo [5].
>
> The goal of this project is add ePUB [6] as an output format to Pier
> enabling existing and future Pier books and other Pier content to be output
> in a format readable by popular eReaders.
>
> [1]�http://www.piercms.com/
> [2]�http://code.google.com/p/pier/
> [3]�http://book.seaside.st/
> [4]�http://www.themoosebook.org/
> [5]�http://book.pharo-project.org/
> [6]�http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
>
> Technical Details
>
> Content in Pier is parsed into a document tree that supports the visitor
> pattern [7] for traversing the internal representation. Pier currently
> supports a number of output formats such as HTML, plain text, RSS, wiki
> text. These formats are generated by visitors. The existing visitors would
> act as a template for creation of an ePUB visitor which would generate ePUB
> compatible output.
>
> [7]�http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern
>
> Benefits to the Student
> The project is well defined with a clear deliverable. The student will gain
> an understanding of the internals of a powerful, well structured content
> management system as well as the satisfaction of having a set of artefacts
> in the format of the existing Pier book content translated into ePUB
> format.
>
> Benefits to the Community
> The Smalltalk community and others using the Pier book authoring engine will
> gain ePUB as an output format. With an ebook output format authors have a
> potential new revenue source, encouraging a virtuous cycle of increasing
> documentation within and outside the community.
>

--
www.tudorgirba.com

"Every thing has its own flow"