The Document Liberation, one year after

announce
#1

Berlin, April 9, 2015 - The Document Liberation is a project of The
Document Foundation, announced in early April 2014 to host the different
libraries handling proprietary and legacy document formats within
LibreOffice. The idea was to provide a single repository for other
software projects willing to deploy the same libraries, in order to
simplify the integration. The project is led by Fridrich Strba and David
Tardon, two long time LibreOffice contributors.

During 2014, members of the project released a new framework library,
called librevenge, which contains all the document interfaces and helper
types, in order to simplify the dependency chain. In addition, they
started a new library for importing Adobe PageMaker documents,
libpagemaker, written as part of Google Summer of Code 2014 by Anurag
Kanungo.

Existing libraries have also been extended with the addition of more
formats, like libwps with the addition of Microsoft Works Spreadsheet
and Database by Laurent Alonso. He is now working on adding support for
Lotus 1-2-3, which is one of the most famous legacy applications for
personal computers. Laurent has also added support for more than twenty
legacy Mac formats to libmwaw.

Developers have created two export libraries - libepubgen for ePub and
librvngabw for Abiword - and are currently working at improving import
filters for Adobe Freehand - libfreehand - and Apple Pages - libetonyek.
Document Liberation libraries are available for Corel WordPerfect
(including Graphics) and Corel Draw, Microsoft Works, AbiWord, Microsoft
Publisher and Microsoft Visio, Apple Keynote, Adobe FreeHand, Aldus
PageMaker, plus many legacy Mac document formats and many e-book formats.

Each library under the Document Liberation umbrella exists as an
independent project, with its own maintainer, release schedule and
license, according to the Ethos of Free Software which is championed by
The Document Foundation.

For more information: http://www.documentliberation.org.