Re: a new feature to pspp and that its output can be exported to an .ods ODF file

[John Darrington]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 03:22:09PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:

     1- The ODF file is an ODT writer, and statisticians almost always use
     spreadsheets to work the results and I want to be able to export the
     result to an ODF .ODS file.
     
     2- I want to be able to generate the result similar to how they do jasp
     or jamovi.
     

This is an interesting idea.   To implement it you would need to create
a new output driver.  I suggest you start by looking at the existing ones
in src/output/

I can however forsee a few issues with your idea:

In PSPP, "output" is intended (at least until now) to be a "document" - ie
its primary purpose is to be read by humans (it can also be post processed
by a machine, but that is not what it's really intended for).  A spreadsheet
on the other hand is great for machine-processing, but not so good for human
readability (see McGill et. al.)

The output comprises three classes of items, viz: Text, Tables and Graphics.
(The topic of Graphics deserves a whole separate discussion).  Text can be
considered as a table, with only one cell.  So these tables, are concatenated
to form a document.  The tables are generally of different dimensions.
So the output is a sequence of heterogenously sized tables.

A spreadsheet, on the other hand is a single table of fixed size.  So I'm not
sure how well pspp output would fit into a spreadsheet.

It might be instructive if you took some samples of  PSPP output from different
sessions and try to format them in .ods - A rough hand constructed spreadsheet
would do to begin with.

Of course, to actually start coding something like this, you would need to be
familiar with the ods internals.  I'm guessing there are similarities to .odt so
the existing src/output/odt.c file might help, but some assistance from a
libreoffice expert would be advantageous too.

J'