LAOLA - формат MS для фалов типа Word, Excel, Access а также файлов конфигурации 1С и т.д. Бинарная структура и общие принципы. Язык Английский.One day I started writing some program that should have access to documents done with Microsoft Word for Windows
6. I wanted to keep it portable, so it was necessary not to use methods specific to operating systems. So I decided to learn to understand the binary structure of the documents.
When looking at the document binaries I soon got confused. At a first glance the documents file format seemed to differ very much from that of files stored with Word
2. When looking more closely it got clear that some very familiar binary pieces was stored within that new looking data. In fact a Word 6 document is somewhat a Word 2 format document stored among additional data. These additional data makes out a kind of file system.
As far as I know there is no publically available information source on how this file system (document format) works. Generally I demand that producing industry has the duty to show what ingredients are in the products. In case of authoring systems I think that people ought to know what kind of information is in their (may be public distributed) documents. E.g., if documents contain information about the creation date, printer(s), directory structure or serial numbers. Or even worse, if documents contain or might contain other private data.
Summarizing this topic for the below described file format, it always stores the last modification date of objects. Because of a bad implementation for Windows
3.x and older distributions of 32 bit Windows systems it still always contains some "data trash" sections. These sections might contain personal data. Of course, depending on the authoring program, other private data might be stored invisible, too.
This text does *not* explain how a Microsoft Word file is structured. This text does explain how the file system works that younger Windows programs like Microsoft Word use to store their documents. So actually it should be called OLE file system, as the philosophy behind this file system is Microsoft's OLE / Com technology. But in lack of any binary level technical specification about this topic my explanation might differ in some cases or even be wrong. In this cases I certainly would not explain the OLE filesystem, but something similar. So I decided to take a similar name, either. The name is LAOLA.
