Calligra/Mid 2010 Meeting with Microsoft

There is a meeting with Dough Mahugh and Chris Rae of Microsoft at a conference room at the Microsoft office at Schiphol from 10:00-12:00 on June 18. Microsoft offered to have a Q and A with us. We accepted and would need a list of issues we would like to ask about. A dedicated wiki page is created to list issues and track progress on them. If issues are left after the meeting we can track them there. This page will give a report of this particular meeting.

General questions

How does does MS Office handle struct members that are in the wrong place? Should the parser always disregard the order or is there a list of exceptions? Reading currently cannot be all that strict, since files that do not follow the specification can be loaded in MS Office and OpenOffice.

Do you have documentation for MS Word 1 and 2?

Is there a canonical or preferred way of writing an OLE container? An OLE container is like a small filesystem, so it could be 'defragmented' or ordered.

Are there grammar files that describe the binary office format?

Where do the unknown structures come from? Are they likely to be written by corrupted program instances or are they valid structures that are missing from the documentation?

Is there an open communication channel where questions about the format documentation can be asked and can be answered?

Would we be allowed to host the documentation PDFs so we can link notes to them? By being allowed to host the documentation, we can keep valid links from the notes to the documentation. The copyright statement already allows hosting parts, so this is probably allowed, but a statement from Microsoft would be appreciated.