Status of Wv2 ?

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Status of Wv2 ?
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @12:23

I'm wondering what is the status of the new import / export MsWord library that Werner Trobin is working on ?
Importing seems to work already quite well but is exporting still a distant dream or can we expect at least basic exporting in a non-too-distant future ?

Cheers,
Charles

PS: switching to Oo formats is a very intelligent move

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Office Suite
·   Also by Charles de Miramon
·   Contact author

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Werner Trobin on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @12:42

Well, I dropped the idea of creating the export code. One reason is that it's just an insane amount of work and I'm only one person with a very limited amount of time. The second reason is, that it's possible to express 100% (yes, really 100%, just read the RTF spec on MSDN) of the MS Word features using RTF. Due to that I'd rather help with RTF export than waste my time on direct .doc export.

Ciao,
Werner

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @14:08

Thanks for answering...

If the RTF export filter is going to be the future path for exporting to MSWord. Could KOffice developers implement the 'Abiword trick' : id est having a .doc exporting filter whih is a rtf file with a .doc extension. I guess, it is rather easy to code and will make life easier to users that don't know what is RTF (or Rich Text Format)and don't want to know.

Focusing on the RTF export filter is definitely the best option. (Power)-users can much more easily create test cases, look the exported rtf code, try to understand where it went wrong and help the developers. Something you can't do as easily with the binary .doc format.

Cheers,
Charles

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Nicolas GOUTTE on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @04:14

RTF as .doc had been discussed in the past but never implemented

Have a nice day!

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Abiword Trick RTF renamed to DOC
by Alan H on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @09:13

I should point out that the "Abiword Trick" has good precedent.

Microsoft Wordpad does not export Binary .DOC either, it only exports RTF renamed to .doc

I also recally Wordperfect and Microsoft using the .doc file extension fairly arbitrarily for various formats including Text and RTF.
There are so many version of DOC anyway that quite quickly you need a riguorous file detection algorithm.

While I am here cheerleading for Abiword I may as well mention that it would be really great if KDE users could take a look at making Abiword blend in better with KDE, I am reliably informed that Abiword follows the freedesktop.org icon specification and should be able to use KDE icons when run in KDE.

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by rjw on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @14:14

I never knew you could get OLE streams into an RTF file. How is this done?

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @15:21

You can embed an ole stream in a RTF file, for example a Excel datasheet in a Word document with the \object tag.

IMHO, embedding one application into another in MSOffice or KOffice is a nice technological trick but is a recipe for ugly looking printed documents because the two applications use different typographical engines, or different fonts. It is also a hog on ressources on a slow computer. It is much more useful, to have intelligent cut&paste for example a wizard to transform a KSpread table in a KWord table.

Cheers,
Charles

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Andy Parkins on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @03:15

This is all very well until you want to edit the embeded object. For example, making an invoice: I want the spreadsheet for doing all the formulaeic work and the word processor for putting some nice headers and footer and any covering text in. And then I want that to be a template so I can use it again. As far as I can tell, intelligent cut and paste just won't cope with that sort of job.

Obviously the option to intelligently remark the is nice to have available but I don't think that should preclude the addition of an embedded facility.

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by johannes wilm on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @08:21

Well, RTF-export is nice. However, there don't seem to be many people around understabnding that code. I tried sending different people code to let the rtf-filter handle tables with only 1 line needing to be changed... I got the answer that nobody had the time/knowledge so that tables will be disabled in rtf-export for 1.3.
I hope that changes some time in the future.

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Nicolas Goutte on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @04:59

Can you re-send that one line of code? (Or point to where the patch is on http://list.kde.org .) I am interested about it.

I am sorry but I was out of "business" for a few months, so I have missed your patch.

Have a nice day!

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Re: Status of Wv2 ?
by Johanneswilm on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @23:54

Hi again,
well my HD has broken down since then, but the newest patch I send I could find on koffice-devel is at http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice-devel&m=105756234418255&w=2 .
The line that needs to be changed is the one starting with "FrameData frame =" .

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