LAOLA

Binary Structures

Laola distribution

is a collection of documentations and perl programs dealing with binary file formats of Windows program documents.
LAOLA is giving access to the raw document streams of any program using "structured storage" technology to save its documents.
ELSER is dealing especially with these streams as they are present in Word 6 and Word 7 documents.

If you do not have a perl, "How to obtain Perl" might help you. To run the programs, you have to get the distribution file (laolaxxx.zip), that includes everything of Laola and Elser, inclusive this document.

This perl 4 collection actually is outdated. It is substituted by the perl 5 module "Ole::Storage", containing the Excel -> HTML convertress Herbert. Find everything necessary here.

New as of 09 April 99: an early approach by Pavel 'CGC' Nygryn to convert Word 6/7 -> TeX. Check it out here!

An approach to read Ole documents via C is made by Andrew Scriven, Arturo Tena and Caolan McNamara. Have a look at the filters project!

Contents

Hacking guide,   Source codes,   How to obtain Perl,  

LAOLA distribution, laola013.zip (160 KB)

Note: some virus scanner unfortunately reports a Word document template in this distribution to contain the "Bloodhound" virus. Be assured that it contains no virus.

GNU General Public License

Comments highly appreciated! Contact:

Martin Schwartz@cs.tu-berlin.de  


About source codes

LAOLA

laola.pl (Quick Reference)
A perl 4 library giving access to Laola files. This library is founding the rest of this distribution.

lclean, Laola Clean (Sample output, doc)
Saves the trash sections of e.g. Word 6, Word 7 or Excel documents to own files, or cleans this trash sections. To demonstrate the free space in such documents, you can insert some file into them.

ldat, Laola Display Authress Title (Sample output)
Lists author, title, creation date and some other information sticked in a laola file. Gets printer information from Excel and Word files. Demonstrates how to read "property sets".

lls, Laola List (Sample output)
Lists the structure of a Laola document.

lhalw, Laola Have A Look at Word
Shows text of Word 6 and Word 7 documents.
Word 8 is a little bit supported, too.

Elser (manual)

Elser, handle Word 6 and Word 7 documents.
Features password resolving, macro decoding and deletion, a little bit virus detection.

About Johann Georg Elser   (das gleiche auf deutsch)

About password protection of Word documents

About Word 6.0 document format