]> The GNOME Structured File Library (GSF) is an I/O abstraction for reading/writing compound files. GSF is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), which allows for flexible licensing of client applications. GSF was written as part of the Gnumeric project. It started in 2002 as a replacement for libole2 which Gnumeric was using to handle the Microsoft Excel file format, as libole2's code had become difficult to maintain and was difficult to generalize. GSF was designed to be a more general library for dealing with a number of different types of structured data files and streams. With the release of Gnumeric 1.1.6 (July 2002), Gnumeric used GSF and libole2 was orphaned. GSF depends on the following libraries: GLib A general-purpose utility library, not specific to graphical user interfaces. GLib provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on. Libxml2 A library that provides a parser and toolkit for XML, the Extensible Markup Language. XML is a metalanguage used to define markup languages (text languages where structure and semantics are added to the content using extra "markup" information). The core GSF library can be built to also utilize the following libraries: zlib A data compression library that implements the DEFLATE algorithm used in gzip. libbz2 A data compression library that implements the algorithm used in bzip2. A separate GSF library can be built that offers additional functionality for use in the GNOME desktop environment. That library has the following additional requirements: gio-2.0 GIO is striving to provide a modern, easy-to-use VFS API that sits at the right level in the library stack. The goal is to overcome the shortcomings of GnomeVFS and provide an API that is so good that developers prefer it over raw POSIX calls. Among other things that means using GObject. It also means not cloning the POSIX API, but providing higher-level, document-centric interfaces. GSF is now also being used by other projects than Gnumeric, including KWord The word processor application of KOffice, the integrated office suite for KDE, the K Desktop Environment. librsvg A library to support the SVG scalable vector graphics format. libwpd A library for importing WordPerfect documents. planner A project management application. The core of GSF's API deals with basic I/O, an abstraction layer that provides a uniform interface to several mechanisms that provide streams of data and a set of parsers for various structured types of data streams.