About 2 months ago, I started working on KWord ODF support. Getting productive working on KWord is no mean task – apart from the mandatory C++/Qt knowledge, one need to know Scribe, KDE, KOffice libs and KWord. I knew only C++/Qt and basic Scribe.

Thankfully, to add small ODF features to KWord, one can conveniently ignore most of the code base and concentrate on 4-5 files. Which is what I have been doing – committing like crazy to 4-5 files Of course, I have never been at ease with this, I usually don’t develop this way but I wanted to have something up and running asap. Now that we (Roop and I) have most of the (supported) ODF test automated (63 in all), I took a 1 week break to read and understand the KWord/KOffice code.

If writing a word processor is not complex enough, KOffice/KWord code is extremely complex thanks to all the code sharing between the koffice applications, libraries, plugins/flake, kparts. So, I thought I should do something on my part to make KWord more approachable to a newbie. The result is:

http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=KWord/Tutorials/LoadingOdf

It’s a code walk through/very detailed introduction to how loading of ODF works in KWord. I have deliberately opted for simplicity over correctness in many places. Some information there might be outright wrong, in which case, please edit the document and fix it (hey, I am new to this stuff too). Also, this probably belongs in techbase.

Writing this document has made me realize that writing code is so much simpler than understanding existing code

Anyhoo, Comments/Suggestions?

P.S: I am in the process of writing the SavingOdf document.