]> The GNOME Structured File Library (GSF) is an I/O abstraction for reading/writing compound files. GSF is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), which allows for flexible licensing of client applications. GSF was written as part of the Gnumeric project. It started in 2002 as a replacement for libole2 which Gnumeric was using to handle the Microsoft Excel file format, as libole2's code had become difficult to maintain and was difficult to generalize. GSF was designed to be a more general library for dealing with a number of different types of structured data files and streams. With the release of Gnumeric 1.1.6 (July 2002), Gnumeric used GSF and libole2 was orphaned. GSF depends on the following libraries: GLib A general-purpose utility library, not specific to graphical user interfaces. GLib provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on. Libxml2 A library that provides a parser and toolkit for XML, the Extensible Markup Language. XML is a metalanguage used to define markup languages (text languages where structure and semantics are added to the content using extra "markup" information). The core GSF library can be built to also utilize the following libraries: zlib A data compression library that implements the DEFLATE algorithm used in gzip. libbz2 A data compression library that implements the algorithm used in bzip2. A separate GSF library can be built that offers additional functionality for use in the GNOME desktop environment. That library has the following additional requirements: libbonobo-2.0 Bonobo is the GNOME architecture for creating reusable software components and compound documents. gnome-vfs-2.0 GnomeVFS is a filesystem abstraction library that allows applications plugable transparent access to a variety of "real" filesystems, including networked filesystems like WebDAV, storage on devices like digital cameras, to the local filesystem. GSF is now also being used by other projects than Gnumeric, including KWord The word processor application of KOffice, the integrated office suite for KDE, the K Desktop Environment. librsvg A library to support the SVG scalable vector graphics format. libwpd A library for importing WordPerfect documents. planner A project management application. The core of GSF's API deals with basic I/O, an abstraction layer that provides a uniform interface to several mechanisms that provide streams of data and a set of parsers for various structured types of data streams. &GsfInput; &GsfOutput; &GsfInfile; &GsfOutfile; &GsfStdio; &GsfMemory; &GsfIOChannel; &GsfGnomevfs; &GsfBonobo; &GsfText; &GsfXml; &GsfZip; &GsfCompression; &GsfMsole; &GsfMetadata; &GsfOpenDocument; &GsfBlobs; &GsfClipData; &GsfUtils; &TreeIndex;