Extand and access the internat Microsoft Office object structure

[gicio]

Hello!

We are currently struggling with a problem of extending Microsoft PowerPoint (PP) freehand line functionality.

Here is our objective:
Imagine you have a brush in your hand and you are drawing a line. You can easily change the thickness of this line while drawing by controlling the pressure on the paper. So after you drew it the line has many different thicknesses in it depending on how many times you changed the pressure while drawing. Back to PP…
We need something like a freehand line, but the output will not just be a line that has the same thickness on the whole length of it. The thickness varies depending on some logic (black box) that is implemented by our algorithm. Image you inherit from “freehand line” object and extend it by characteristics described in the brush example (different thicknesses contained by one continuous line). We need something that behaves the same way when you scale it (zoom) like lines in PP do. That means that the thickness of line is not affected by scaling, opposite to objects in PP, which change their shapes while scaling.
We have written our own OLE server, which creates such line, but when we copy it into PP it becomes an object that does not scale like a line - it changes its shape while scaling.

We think that one of possible directions could be to find out the structure and format of all possible object types supported by MS Office (Lines, Shapes, objects, etc). Examine them and find the one that has the closest match to our requirements. Then inherit from it, extend it and introduce it SOMEHOW to PP as a new custom drawing object type/class. We have not found any information on types and formats or the possibility to extend the standard graphical office objects types by custom graphical objects. Maybe if you spent a lot of $$ on MS Certificates and you have a certain level of support this information and appropriate framework is accessible to you?

We think that this problem requires a real expert in MS Office Area therefore we post it here.

Any help will be gratefully appreciated.


Cheers,


gicio