Hello!

Welcome to OLE-Storage-0.381.tar.gz

A perl 5 distribution of a Structured Storage interface. 


Available at:

    http://wwwwbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/index.html

    http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/index.html


What is Structured Storage?

It's the binary data format of standard Microsoft Windows OLE documents. 
Hitherto it was only safe to deal with Windows documents at Windows
operating systems. OLE::Storage is an interface for all operating systems.


What does OLE::Storage?

It gives access to the raw data streams of documents, that are done by
e.g. Microsoft Word or Star Word. Further more, OLE::PropertySet gives 
access to PropertySets as they are defined e.g. in those OLE documents. 


What can you do with OLE::Storage?

If you have to deal with binary documents done at MS Windows platforms,
but your locale machine is not, you might find a developing tool. Apart
from this, the distribution contains some utilities:

- "lhalw" converts MS Word 6+ documents to plain text.

- "lls" analyzes the document's structure.

- "ldat" lists a document's properties. So it could be used e.g. to look, 
  who created a document when.

- "lclean" lists and removes the trash sections from documents.


Has it something to do with LAOLA?

Laola was the former name of this distribution. The name came up as follows.
On the one hand Laola is a little bit similar to OLE. I wanted to have it
similar, because an often used name for Structured Storage documents is "OLE
documents". On the other hand the name should be different from OLE to show,
that the modules are standalone and have no contact at all to Microsoft's
OLE interfaces.


Module list:

OLE::
::Storage          aupO  Structured Storage / OLE document interface
::PropertySet      aupO  Property Set interface


Comments welcome! 

Contact: schwartz@cs.tu-berlin.de


Yours, Martin