OpenRaster and OpenDocument: Metadata
OpenRaster is a file format for the exchange of layered images, and is loosely based on the OpenDocument standard. I previously wrote about how a little extra XML can make a file that is both OpenRaster and OpenDocument compatible. The OpenRaster specification is small and relatively simple, but it does not do everything, so what happens if a developer wants to do something not covered by the standard? What if you want to include metadata?How about doing it the same way as OpenDocument, it does not have to be complicated. OpenDocument already cleverly reused the existing Dublin Core (dc) standard for metadata, and includes a file called
meta.xml in the zip container. A good idea worth borrowing, a simplified example file follows:Sample OpenDocument Metadata[Pastebin]
(if you can't see the XML here directly, see the link to Pastebin instead.)
I extended the OpenRaster code in Pinta to support metadata in this way. This is the easy part, it gets more complicated if you want to do more than import and export within the same program. As before the resulting file can renamed from
.ora to .odg and be opened using OpenOffice* allowing you to view the image and the metadata too. The code is Pinta OraFormat.cs is freely available on GitHub under the same license (MIT X11) as Pinta. The relevant sections of are "ReadMeta" and "GetMeta". A Properties dialog and other code was also added, and I've edited a screenshot of Pinta to show both the menu and the dialog at the same time: 
[* OpenOffice 3 is quite generous, and opens the file without complaint. LibreOffice 4 is far less forgiving and gives an error unless I specifically choose "ODF Drawing (.odg)" as the file type in the Open dialog]