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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: file formats [Re: Question about your KPresenter's review]
From:       Catherine Olanich Raymond <cathy () thyrsus ! com>
Date:       2002-03-13 4:52:48
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On Monday 11 March 2002 05:50 am, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Sunday 10 March 2002 05:18 pm, Catherine Olanich Raymond wrote:


> > > mp3 offers about 1:10 savings in size (comparing to Audio CD), Koffice
> > > - about 1:6, which is quite comparable (may be, can be imprroved
> > > further)
>
> If people were even slightly bothered by the size of their word processing
> documents, they wouldn't be saving .doc files.  (Word has RTF and such
> built in, you know.)

Most users don't even think about the size of the Word files unless they have 
to load them onto a floppy, which (as you point out) most of us don't.  And 
no, I didn't know Word has RTF built in.  If that's the case, why is it so 
hard to get non MS software to read/edit it?



> > I see the analogy.  I observe, however, that many of the advantages of
> > the mp3 format (ease of distribution, greater reliability) are easy for a
> > user to understand.  That's less true, I fear, for the advantages of
> > KOffice.
>
> Nah, the analogy falls apart because the only reason mp3 was ever
> interesting in the first place is that you could convert back and forth to
> CD format trivially. 

Gee, and here I thought it was interesting because it made it easy to pass 
music files over the Internet at will.  :-)

But I see your point, Rob.   Being able to pass them over the Internet would 
be of little use if you couldn't store them easily and replay them again and 
again. That's what the re-conversion to CD format gets you.



> I'd also like to point out that the analogy breaks down because the
> standard way CDs are used is read-only.  Very few people regularly edit
> CDs.  With the commercial ones, you can't do so, and not too many people
> have music editing software, or the skill, or the time to remix songs
> without the source tapes nicely separated into tracks...

Now *this* point is relevant to the issues I originally started the 
discussion in the first place.  Thanks for putting the point so concisely.

Rob is right, Vadim.  The real issue with .doc files is not getting software 
to read (analogy to "play" them) but with getting software that will both 
read them *and* edit them (analogy to "mix", "record," etc.).  

I am using SO purely because it allows me to do these things, and even so it 
doesn't do them perfectly.  I often have to fix fomatting details (tab stops 
dropped, page numbers mutilated, headers chopped) after I reimport documents 
I edited in StarOffice's "Word" format back to our law firm's Windows 
system....



> > > Later: we get KOffice on Qt/Embedded, working on Compaq iPAQ / Sharp
> > > Zaurus / Casio Cassiopea, and you get really "portable documents".
>
> I've got portable documents.  I've got a dell laptop.  It came with windows
> before I reformatted it.  The zaurus has an annoying keyboard, and the rest
> don't have any keyboard.  (Have you ever tried doing any actual work on a
> zaurus screen?)
>
> That's nice, but the entire userbase of those three products combined is
> considerably smaller than that of the macintosh.  Why not go after the 90%
> of the market using windows first, and THEN worry about the corner cases?

My sentiments also.




> > > MS Office was designed to read many formats, but to write only (mostly)
> > > MS Office formats, "to lock" the user base into MS Office.
> >
> > Right; it's one of MS's tools for maintaining its monopoly; I understand
> > that.
>
> One detail he missed is that the product has over a 90% market share of all
> word processing documents being produced in north america.  This lock in
> has been very very effective, and any solution that hopes it simply goes
> away without having to address it goes well beyond wishful thinking...

Too, too, true.  :-(



> > > Taking into consideration that KWord's native format is XML, you can
> > > translate it into virtually everything, using XSLT. Filter to do it via
> > > UI is not ready yet.  But you still can do it using manual coding.
> >
> > Sure; but the UI's the thing that will give ordinary users the power to
> > chuck MS off their desktops, etc. forever.  :-)  

> I've looked at the XML, and it seems nice.  I've also looked at the
> infrastructure of the unfinished skyscraper that Intel was building in
> downtown austin, and it too seems very nice.  It has no roof, walls, or
> floors between levels, and Intel has stopped construction on it for the
> forseeable future, but the girders look quite lovely.
>
> When (if ever) the building is complete, I hope that the girders will be
> covered up in such a way that ordinary users of the building, taking the
> elevator from floor to floor and visiting offices and such, won't have to
> see or interact with them if they don't want to.  Right now, Intel's
> looking to sell it, and it may be torn down so something else can be built
> on the site...

Ordinary users also don't have the motivation, or the time, to learn how to 
do the manual coding to translate documents from XML to Word format or 
whatever.  KWord may be great, but until non-technical users can read *and* 
edit Word documents with it without significant problems, they will have 
little interest in using KWord.



> Saying one killer app is going to launch your platform above an established
> contender with a dozen killer apps is like saying "Voyager" was bound to
> make UPN a more popular network than NBC, ABC, or CBS.

I don't think Vadim is saying that "one killer app" is going to launch 
KOffice or anything else.  I think he is simply recognizing that the real 
bottleneck between the adoption of KOffice by non-techies is the .doc 
translation issue.  You've said so yourself.


> And this is assuming you get even one killer application, and that nobody
> clones it.  Wishful thinking again...

Perhaps.  But we're not at that level yet, either.



> > > |   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.
> > >
> > > Right. And that's what we want to achieve with KWord as well.
> > >
> > > Problem with Star Office that it can't support Cyrillic correctly.
>
> But it can support ENGLISH correctly...

Almost correctly, anyhow, as I said above.  :-)


> I don't LIKE Star Office.  It just happens to be the only system that
> currently meets the minimum definition of working.  (It's also hideously
> bundled together into a big single monolithic pig of an application with
> the unbundled version not available for download, and I like KDE anyway...)

Agreement on this front.


-- 
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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