RELEASE-0.8

LpOD 0.8 released
===================

lpOD -- languages & platforms OpenDocument.
Definition of a Free Software API implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 standard.
Development, for higher level use cases, in Python, Perl and Ruby languages.
of a top-down oriented API.

- The architecture design is complete.
- The functional lpOD coverage is 90% complete.
- Only Python implementation is available (80% complete), and serves as the
  reference implementation
- This release starts providing command-line tools for introspection and
  manipulation.
- The documentation is now online http://docs.lpod-project.org
- Cookbooks provide ready-to-use examples of the API for ODT, ODS and ODP
  (tables, tocs, notes, images frames, slides transitions, shapes, ... )

:Web: http://lpod-project.org
:Documentation: http://docs.lpod-project.org
:IRC: irc://irc.freenode.org/lpod


Python Implementation
----------------------

Low-level API
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- All types of styles are supported in the low-level API.
- Text search and replace API is added 
- Basic shapes can be created: ellipse and circle, rectangle and square, and line.
- Adding non ODF resources (e.g. images, pdf, ...) in documents
- A Virtual File System (VFS) layer handles grabbing document from HTTP and FTP.
- After starting with the libxml2 Python wrapper, switched to lxml for both speed and ease of use.

High-level API
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Template are provided, with empty body, i.e. the ODT template has no
  paragraph, the ODS template has no table and the ODP template has no draw
  page.
- A document can grab styles from another document to merge them with its own
  ones.
- A specific API is available on paragraphs to insert notes and annotation.
- A specific API is available for tables to abstract the XML model,
  e.g. you can access cell "C3" without knowning the storage.
- Tables can be created from and exported to CSV.
- The full API to metadata is available. Only RDF would be missing.
- The navigation API no longer use a context element. The element itself is
  the navigation API.

Command-line Utilities
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- The lpod-show.py tool dumps a textual representation of the content. It can
  also dump the latter, style information and metadata list in a directory.
- The lpod-meta.py introspection tool can list and edit metadata of the
  document.
- The lpod-merge.py tool can merge documents of the same type. ODT, ODP, 
  ODS and CSV and supported for now. 
- The lpod-highlight.py tool can apply a style on a text pattern. The default
  style is overlining as if you were using a yellow highlighter pen.