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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
From:       Catherine Olanich Raymond <cathy () thyrsus ! com>
Date:       2002-03-05 6:52:55
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On Friday 01 March 2002 05:11 pm, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 February 2002 12:32 am, Catherine Olanich Raymond wrote:
> > > |   > 2.  My law office still uses Windows.  Because I sometimes work
> > > |   > at home, any machine I use at home must be able to understand and
> > > |   > edit MS Word documents. 

[substantial amount of text cut here]


> File formats are a communications protocol.  A way of sending data from one
> user to another.  Even word processing ones: you get .doc files in an
> attachment because there's a critical mass of people out there who generate
> them and who expect them.
>
> They ain't gonna convert to a new format until you convert their tools out
> from under them, and to do that, your tools MUST handle the old format well
> enough to be usable with the old format.  Period, end of story.
>

Thanks, Rob.  That puts the issues I was trying to work up to getting across 
into a convenient nutshell.





> Portable Document Format.  Naturally, since it has the word "portable" in
> the name, it's pretty much by one company only (Adobe), and by "portable"
> they mean "both windows and macintosh".  (Queue blues brothers: "We have
> both kinds of music here: Country and Western!")
>
> Konqueror should be able to handle them, and if not the command "xpdf" from
> he command line displays them quite well.
>
> They're mostly a presentation format rather than a word processing format,
> though.  More akin to powerpoint than word.

Thanks for the helpful explanation.



> KWord never struck me as badly written or badly designed.  Just incomplete
> and maybe in need of a little more testing.

I agree with that assessment.  I certainly didn't have the kind of grief with 
KWord that I had with KPresenter.





> A web browser that can't understand HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and in
> some cases flash plugins, is unusable on the internet today.  It doesn't
> matter if it handles postscript, docbook, and the old OS/2 INF file format
> spectacularly.  It's not a usable web browser because that's not what all
> the web pages people want to look at are in.
>
> A tool that can convert HTML into something else you can view might be
> decent.  Might even be part of a somewhat useful read-only web browser. 
> But you can't do online banking with it, or send email through a web-based
> service.
>
> If I receive a document from someone, there is no point whatsoever in being
> able to edit it if I can't send it BACK.  I might as well just have a
> viewer, not a word processor.  And sending it back to a windows user (still
> 90% of the market and going to stay that way until this chicken and egg
> problem is solved) in KWord, when what they're going to try to read it with
> is Microsoft Word, is truly pointless.

I agree with all of this.  But I thought Vadim's comment was about getting 
more data into smaller packages, not so much the "can you translate the 
format" problem.  Or is it the same problem.




> > > Ironically, but documentation is not the biggest problem withg KWord or
> > > KPresenter . At least in my opinion.
>
> I think KPresenter is designed around the wrong premise.  KWord is a
> seperate issue.

Yes, KWord is a separate issue, and one I really didn't want to get into 
until I posted my comments about it to the group.




> Export of word files is a MUCH harder problem than import.  Microsoft word
> dumps its run-time structures to disk with block writes.  Yes with all the
> endianness issues and compiler-chosen packing offsets that implies.  Yes
> it's full of unnecessary data that will still cause the program to crash if
> you get it wrong.  This is the real reason Word 2000 can't write a Word 97
> file: even Microsoft can't make that work because it's black magic to them
> too. And why word for macintosh or Alpha-NT can't always write
> windows-readable files.  (READING them is easy.  Only a small subset of the
> data is actually signal rather than noise as far as the word processing
> document itself is concerned, and when you don't understand something it's
> possible to degrade gracefully and guess or lose a little formatting rather
> than crashing.  But when you write the file, word's going to suck the
> structures into memory and try to use them, and if you get it wrong word
> will crash.  And you wonder why it's so easy to write so many different
> kinds of word viruses...)

I think this is the real answer to the person who asked me, in an earlier 
posting, "Why don't you get MS-Word for Macintosh" or something like that.




> Star Office got this to work via years of anal-retentive germans
> painstakingly reverse engineering stuff (going back to when it was an OS/2
> product).  The file format they produce is full of black magic values and
> voodoo programming that even they don't understand, they just know you have
> to put this stuff here or word has a problem reading it.  They actually
> write better and more portable .doc files than word itself does.  (Imagine
> applying a security patch to your system and suddenly your word processor
> can't read old files, or writes files that old unpatched versions can't
> read.  Or that causes your word processor to have subtle run-time errors
> five pages of typing later.  Fun thought, isn't it?  Welcome to the
> microsoft world...)

I know that StarOffice does succeed in letting me edit Word documents, 
reimport them onto a Windows system, and then continue editing them in 
Word97, with amazingly little loss of format and no loss of content.  As a 
user, that's what I care about.  






> > I did not attempt to use KWord for opening MS Word documents from my
> > office based on reports from Rob Landley and because I had already found
> > Star Office usable for that purpose 
>
> We first tried Red Hat 7.1 (OpenOffice 1.0, I think), with no .doc file
> support at all.  Then we tried 7.2, which can read word files, and write
> RTF files.  Ok, I can see this, decent way to avoid the word export
> problem, word can read RTF (usually pretty transparently too), so it's a
> tolerable choice. But KWord can't read RTF files.  My response to that
> turns the "R" into a "W"...

> It's like whoever wrote it had such a windows-centric view of the world
> that interoperating with other windows users was important, and
> interoperating with other KDE users in the same environment was a situation
> that had simply never occurred to them.  If I distribute an RTF document to
> my office mailing list, KWord users can't read it.  Even I can't read it
> unless I keep the original...
>
> Did I miss something?  I feel I must have, but I couldn't find a way to
> make it read RTF...

I thought this all was bizarre when you first told me about it, Rob, and I 
still think so.  


>
> > We tried to download OpenOffice, but it broke each time I tried even to
> > create a new document in it.  :-(
>
> I had a similar reaction to AbiWord about a year ago.  I'm told they've
> fixed it...

Time to try it, then.....

-- 
Cathy Raymond <cathy@thyrsus.com>

"The meeting of personalities is like the contact of chemical substances; 
if there is any reaction, both are transformed."  Carl Jung
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