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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] KDE 3.5 is very alive! Possible Dot-Story?
From:       Karl-Heinz Zimmer <khz () kde ! org>
Date:       2006-04-06 19:13:24
Message-ID: 200604062113.25107 () postmaster ! bugcops ! org
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Hi all,

me not really being one of the most active KOffice developers,
I would still like to mention my opinion on this subject here:

Am Wednesday 05 April 2006 20:46 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Wednesday 05 April 2006 13:29, Birger Kollstrand wrote:
> > For the majority of the world decent MS office compatibiløity is
> > a must. How is that now in KOffice? If it's not good then it's
> > hard to make it a star to promote.
(...)
> for enterprise usage, excellent ms office compat is a must (and for
> many, even OOo isn't good enough). for many home, educational and
> small office users it's not really that important. approximate
> support is good enough as they generally create more than they
> review other's documents and formats such as PDF and HTML are used
> more regularly for interchange. and let's face it, ODF is the future
> here (even if that is a long-term goal)

Having spent a lot of time on MS Office filters years ago, I can
safely ensure you, that there is *no* way, to obtain "excellent"
MS Office compatibility at all.

It just can not be done.  All you can hope, is to achieve some
kind of compat, that's good enough for 90 percent of the documents,
and even that requires a big amount of work.

OTOH MS Office compat is a moving target, since they use to change
internal details without further notice to developers.  In the past
this implied them doing 'dirty' hacks like e.g. using the MSB of a
long int (that was used to indicate the file position in a stream)
as a boolean flag, when they needed yet another bool, but did not
want to add another variable to their control structures in MS Word.

So, even when one has some kind-of good compat today, they still
need to put efforts in updating that, again and again ... and I
seriously doubt that this "guessing what MS has hacked here again"
is something a Free Software developer finds fascinating enough to
motivate her/him to spend years after years on this task.  ;-)

So, I am not sure, but I kind of think, that perhaps it might be
better not to spend too much energy on running behind MS, but
rather concentrate on KOffice's strengths and make them even better.

Cheers
Karl-Heinz  (the above is just my 2 cents, as in: I might be wrong)

-- 
 "For every complex problem there is an
  answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."  H. L. Mencken, 1880 - 1956
 
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