Handling Document Formats
Handling Document Formats
There are many use-cases that may require Qt applications to deal with document formats – usually either involving transparently parsing/writing documents, or displaying documents to the user.
This page covers some general considerations, and provides an overview of wiki pages discussing available options for specific formats.
General Considerations
The Scribe Framework
While not being able to provide built-in functionality for every imaginable document handling use-case, Qt does ship with a generic rich text document framework, nicknamed “Scribe”.
It revolves around the class QTextDocument, which provides an object-oriented frame-based representation of a document consisting of blocks (sub-frames, paragraphs, tables, lists, …) which in turn can contain strings of styled text fragments.
API is included for loading from HTML and saving to HTML and ODT (see QTextDocumentWriter), as well as for displaying documents to the user (in read-only or interactively editable mode) through QTextEdit .
The Scribe framework’s built-in document feature set (which all built-in loading/saving/displaying/editing operations are limited to) covers only the basics and doesn’t come anywhere close to what modern full-featured document formats and authoring tools (like Microsoft Word) support, although it is sufficient for many tasks such as generating reports. Most parts of the framework are extensible through subclassing, so application authors can implement additional document features or save/load formats as they see fit.
XML Processing
Many modern document formats are based on XML. So depending on what kind of processing you wish to perform, manual parsing/writing using Qt’s powerful XML handling classes might be a viable option.
- The efficient XML Streaming classes available in QtCore are recommended for most purposes.
- In some cases the SAX and DOM classes from the QtXml module can be a useful alternative.
- If your application needs to repeatedly extract a certain piece of information, or apply a certain transformation, on many documents with a similar structure, then the QtXmlPatterns module might provide an elegant solution.
Individual Formats
For information/tips (gathered by the community) on how to work with a specific document format in your Qt application, click on the name of the format in the list below:
Text Documents
.html .htm .xhtml | ||
.doc .docx | (native format of Microsoft Word) | |
.odt | (native format of OpenOffice/LibreOffice Writer, among others) | |
.rtf | (here referring specifically to Microsoft’s “RTF” format, not rich text in general) | |
.tex |
Spreadsheets
.xls, .xlsx | (native format of Microsoft Excel) | |
.ods | (native format of OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc, among others) | |
.csv | (simple file format that is widely supported by consumer, business, and scientific applications.) |
Presentations
.ppt, .pptx | (native format of Microsoft Powerpoint) | |
.odp | (native format of OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress, among others) |
Math/Formulae
.mml | ||
.odf | (native format of OpenOffice/LibreOffice Math, among others) | |
.
See Also
- Handling Graphics Formats
- Handling Multimedia Formats
- Handling Data Formats
- Handling Container Formats