OpenOffice.org 1.9 m65 Snapshot

While releasing the 1.1.4 Final to public, the OOo developers have continued to update the 1.9.x version which will be version 2.0 in this year. For now, the latest snapshot of 1.9.x version (updated per three weeks) is 1.9 m65 which is released on 17 December 2004. For you who use OpenOffice.org for production use, don't update to this version, as it still contains a lot of bugs and incompatibilty, because OOo is developing a new XML file format which is somehow may not be backward compatible with the stable version (1.1.4).

Just like the other 1.9.x version, this release comes with ugly hacked splash screen to make clear, that this is not the final 2.0 build. In the snapshot page, you should see that there is an important note about the file format. Some documents that have been saved with SRC680 build prior to m64 cannot be loaded into SRC680m64 and future builds. This especially applies to Writer documents. To be able to load them, the file need to be coverted.

The conversion can be done as follows:

1. Create a backup of the document.
2. Rename the document to a file with the same name but an extensions that has the 2nd "o" replaced with a "d". For instance, test.oot becomes test.odt. For drawing documents, use the extension "odg". For templates,only the extension of drawing templates has to be changed to "otg".
3. Unzip the sub documents "mimetype" and "META-INF/manifest.xml" from the document using an arbitrary zip tool.
4. Within the unzipped "mimetype" and "META-INF/manifest.xml" files, replace all occurencies of "x-vnd.oasis.openoffice" with "vnd.oasis.opendocument".
5. Add the "mimetype" file uncompressed to the document.
6. Add "META-INF/manifest.xml" to the document.
7. Load the document into OpenOffice.org and resave it.

For a file called test.oot, on Unix/Solaris the following commands do that job:

> cp test.oot test.odt
> unzip test.odt mimetype META-INF/manifest.xml
> mv mimetype mimetype.bak
> sed -e"s/x-vnd\.oasis\.openoffice/vnd.oasis.opendocument/"

mimetype.bak >mimetype

> zip -0 test.odt mimetype
> mv META-INF/manifest.xml META-INF/manifest.xml.bak
> sed -e"s/x-vnd\.oasis\.openoffice/vnd.oasis.opendocument/"
META-INF/manifest.xml.bak >META-INF/manifest.xml

> zip test.odt META-INF/manifest.xml
> [start OpenOffice.org, load file and dave it again]

Background: The OASIS Open Office Technical Committee (TC) recently decided to rename its specification from "Open Office Specification 1.0" to "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0", abbreviated "OpenDocument". At the same time the TC decided to use new extensions (odt, ods, etc. instead oot, oos, etc.), new MIME types (application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text, etc. instead of application/vnd.oasis.openoffice.text, etc) and new XML namespace URIs.
This change has been implemented in SRC680m64.
Elizabeth explained the proper naming in her message to the dev@l10n list.