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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: KOffice issues [Re: Question about your KPresenter's review]
From:       Catherine Olanich Raymond <cathy () thyrsus ! com>
Date:       2002-03-05 7:02:00
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On Monday 04 March 2002 10:19 am, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> On Saturday 02 March 2002 01:11, Rob Landley wrote:
> |   On Wednesday 27 February 2002 12:32 am, Catherine Olanich Raymond
> | wrote:
>
> 
> |   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.
> |
> |   The 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.
>
> I beleive we are still at the beginning, not at the end :-)
> I agree 100% with you [Rob] that we need to achieve crtitical mass first.
> And KWord/KOffice for Windows [despite the fact that many KDE developers
> and users *hate* Windows] would be a great tool to increase KOffice's User
> Base.

It sure would.



> |   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.
>
> AFAIK Konqueror displays those PDFs perfectly.
> You just need "kdegarphics" RPM /package to be installed. as KGhostScript
> is part of that package.

That "KDEGraphics" RPM/package isn't part of KOffice?  Why not?



> |   KWord never struck me as badly written or badly designed.  Just
> | incomplete and maybe in need of a little more testing.
>
> It depends what you mean under "completeness" :-)
> Is Word 2000 complete? For sure.
> But I doubt you canuse it for something different than "fax printing"
> It even doesn't have WYSIWIG!

I don't know about that.  Now, I haven't tried Word2000; our office still 
uses Word97.  We routinely (though occasionally with some swearing) use 
Word97 for letters, long briefs with footnotes, stuff like that.  But I find 
it hard to believe even of Microsoft that the successor product would be 
*that* brain dead.

> And if you at least once asked your MS Word to "export HTML" - than you
> already know that you should NEVER use this feature.

So I've been told.  :-(



> |
> |   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.
>
> You need to save that doc in HTML, or print to PDF.
> HTML generated by KWord can be easliy imported to Word 2000.
> I tested it several times, it works.

Wait a minute.  Why should I, an artless user, have to save my KWord document 
in HTML just to get a product that someone using a Word machine can read?  

In addition, I'm moved to wonder what would happen if the Word2000 user I 
sent such a document to attempted to edit it in Word and send it back to me.  
That's the type of thing I have to do regularly in my job.





> BTW: is someone working on compatibility with StarOffice6/OpenOffice (OO)?
> I rememebr it was discussed once on this list, around 6 months ago, but
> have no further info.
> As StarOffice will use XML-based file format, I guess writing
>      StarOffice <-> KOffice
> filter should be not so difficult as writing MS Word export filter.
> It would be nice too if StarOffice/OO separated import/export operations
> from the main package.
> Than I guess you can use folowing sequence:
> * import MS Word doc to OO
> * save in XML/OO format
> * convert from XML/OO to XML/KOffice
>
> Than you even won't have to open StarOffice/OO, you can edit docs using
> KOffice!

Uh....I'm not following this.  Don't you still need OO to convert the Word 
document to something KOffice can handle?


-- 
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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