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Re: .doc write compatibility
by Kris Kerwin on Tuesday 30/Nov/2004, @16:10
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I'm beginning to find it quite difficult to post an opinion in online forums pertaining to UNIX workalikes. I have to try very hard to watch what I say -- to not to start a flame war with a single thread. I am at the point that I am nearly discouraged from commenting in the first place.
In our "community which is still heavily based on voluntariness" to survive, we do not only volunteer our time and effort; which I am unable to provide as I lack the skills to apply to a project, the time in order to obtain those skills, and the money to fund the further development. No -- we also volunteer ideas.
I believe, as an outsider looking in upon the world of the developer, that that is much of what coding is: forming ideas. However, I do not possess the ability to express these ideas in terms appreciable by a compiler -- only what may be understood by a person.
I feel that it is counterintuitive for a community that's greatest commodity is imagination to stunt the spread of information. I feel that comments like the one above not only debate the views of another -- which is fine, even welcomed in an intellectual community such as this -- but also contribute to in effect discouraging comments in the first place. Speak to newbies -- there is a sense of fear in many, including myself. This is as dangerous as the propriety that we seek to fight.
To perhaps justify my motivations for posting the grandparent comment, I present the following. Curious as to why no work had yet started on this feature, I checked at www.koffice.org. I felt that with a file-format so widely used outside of the UNIX world, surely some discussion had begun about the possibility of beginning work on one. I found no discussion. I searched the wish-lists at bugs.kde.org, and still found nothing. As far as was evident to me, no discussion had yet begun, the feature was not being considered as a possiblity. The purpose of my comment was not to demand a feature as an angry end-user, insensitive to the needs of the developer; the purpose of my comment was to hopefully begin such a discussion, with the end product being the suggested feature.
I apologize if I offended some; that was not my goal. My intentions were only to make a suggestion, to begin a discussion, and receive input. It appears to me, however, that I made a mistake in picking my forum, though I felt that the topic did contain some relevance as others were speaking of support for other file-formats.
Please, let's continue.
Kris Kerwin
kkerwin@insi__REMOVE_ME__ghtbb.com |
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Re: .doc write compatibility
by ac on Wednesday 01/Dec/2004, @00:13
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Asking for .doc format compatibility however is in no way a creative idea. Actually reverse enginering and ensuring compatibility with a broken illogical format is about the most boring and repetitive job one can do, unless one is motivated by such a Herculean challenge by the sake of it, someone whom you can doubt to find at places like here where everyone either contributes already or prefers not to contribute at all. It's in my (and I'm sure others') interest to discourage such requests like yours unless they are backed in some substantial way (you could easily pledge money, offer to collect and maintain a collection of useful reverse enginered information about the .doc format etc. but you did none of that to begin with and such have no idea about the effort involved at all). If you want to encourage development ask Eric Laffoon how he got Quanta to where it is today.
And no, you offended nobody, posts like yours usually just get ignored for the above reasons. I'm just trying to do you a service by pointing out this fact and saving you the time to write more such posts if you don't intend to back your own suggestions. Writing text on some random forum and doing nothing else but still expection something to change is very cheap. Heck, you didn't even react to my suggestion to just pay a developer to create what is worth being created in your opinion.
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Re: .doc write compatibility
by Nicolas Goutte on Thursday 02/Dec/2004, @09:49
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I do think that there were discussions about this subject. (I mean: even beyond the classical "Why do you not use OO's filter code?")
Seeing how difficult it is to make a stable RTF export filter that work with most word processor applications, I personally think that doing a correct MS Word export would be even more difficult. (With also probably the problem to know which (sub-)version to support.)
So personally, I would prefer that we get enough effort to make a correct RTF export filter first. But even that is difficult, because those knowing how to develop have either no time or no copy of MS Word to test the result... or both problems.
Have a nice day!
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