Welcome!

cole is a free C OLE library. It is distributed under the GNU General Public
License (GPL) to help more software be released as free software.

cole can handle Microsoft OLE's Structured Storage and Compound Files,
which are used in files generated by many Microsoft programs.
Examples of programs that uses Compound Files are: Microsoft Word 6/95/97,
Excel 5/95/97, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft PowerPoint.
OLEdecode function extracts streams from such kind of files, while OLEcode
function takes some streams and generates a Compound File.

cole doesn't know about internal structure of a stream, it only reads the
raw data. You can use then the Microsoft's documentation available at
<http://msdn.microsoft.com> or the information available at
<http://www.wotsit.org> to read that structure.

cole is for developers that want to handle such files in an enviroment
where Microsoft's functions are not available or its usage is not
desirable.

cole is written in ANSI C for the greatest portability, but it can use
some plataform specific functions if available for the greatest
performance.


Documentation
*************

cole is documented in the `cole Programmer Reference', which is
included in the subdirectory `doc'. In such directory, there are a
subdirectory named `cole-manual', which is the HTML version.

If you have DocBook tools installed and you want the RTF format (which
can be read by the most populars word processing programs), just do:
`cd doc; make rtf'. Of course, the source DocBook cole-manual.sgml file is
included too.

Documentation about cole internals can be found in the file `HACKING'.


How to compile cole:
********************

A standard `configure' script is provided, read the file `INSTALL'.
Briefly, just execute `./configure' to autogenerate a Makefile for you,
then execute `make' to compile cole and `make install' to install it.

Read the documentation for details.


Downloading:
************

The most recent version is in:
<http://arturo.directmail.org/filtersweb/>

You can search also in:
<ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/libs/>


References:
***********

cole:
<http://arturo.directmail.org/filtersweb/>

OLE-Storage (formerly LAOLA):
<http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/perl/>

Authors and current maintainer emails: see the file `AUTHORS'.


Finally:
********

You must understand that if you use cole, wich is released under GPL, you
must release the source code of your program in a compatible license.
Read the file `COPYING'.


	The current maintainer
	(see `AUTHORS' for details).
