[sword-devel] Working on a STEP Reader for SWORD

[Trandahl, Steve]

This is stretching my rusty C++ skills.  If I am reading the code correctly,
calling the zBuf method suggested below will compress the text into the
compressed buffer.  However, the text I'm reading from the STEP files is
already compressed.  I guess I want to put the text directly into the
compressed buffer without altering it.

Are there any suggestions as to how to set this up?  I thought about
overriding the zBuf method to skip the compression, but then there would be
no way to compress using this class.

Thanks,
Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Troy A. Griffitts [mailto:scribe@crosswire.org]
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2000 8:10 PM
To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] Working on a STEP Reader for SWORD


Steve,
	It's not a bad as others might suggest.  We do have STEP
decompression
classes.  You will find them under
sword/src/modules/common/lzsscomprs.cpp

a convoluted example of using this class can be found in
sword/tests/complzss

A you will probably use the buffer methods to send chunks of a STEP
module for decompression, eg.

// set compressed buffer to the lzss compression class
compress.zBuf(blockSize, compressedBuf);

// ask the compression class for the decompressed buffer
cout << "Decompressed text: " << compress.Buf();


Hope this gives ya a start.  The STEP spec will tell you that umpteen
bytes at the beginning of the index files tell you meta data and then
you'll start getting to real data blocks eventually.  Try sending one of
these data blocks to the compress class and you should get plain text
data back (well STEP's RTF+ markup with data).  You will then want to
visit our filter collection:

sword/src/modules/filters/

These filters are used for parsing different markup methodologies.  We
have some for rtf, gbf, html, etc.  You might be able to start with one
of these and see if you can get some basic text to display.

	Please feel free to ASK LOTS OF QUESTIONS! :)


			-Troy.




"Trandahl, Steve" wrote:
> 
> I would like to create a module for Sword that would allow it to read
books
> in the STEP format.  I understand that there has been some work done, but
> that no one is currently working on it.  How do I locate the existing
source
> code for it?
> 
> 
> Steve Trandahl
> Cotelligent Philadelphia
>  <mailto:Steve.Trandahl@Cotelligent.com> Steve.Trandahl@Cotelligent.com
> 
>