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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: [Fwd: MS Office filters...]
From:       "Jacques Chester" <jacques.chester () student ! usyd ! edu ! au>
Date:       2000-04-16 22:44:17
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> On Sun, Apr 16, 2000 at 12:59:36PM -0500, Peter J. Hutnick wrote:
> > I think that part of the point of this was for "someone" to set up
a "web
> > based gateway" on the internet so that you can just dump an
unreadable
> > attachment into a web page and get back useable xml.
>
> Is that possible ? Scripting VBA from a web page ?

Microsoft call it "ActiveScript". The same API for
"VBScript", "JavaScript" and "PerlScript" (yes, Perl).
Part of their ASP model.

> Doesn't sound sensible for people without Internet access, BTW...

You got that right :)

And not real scalable either. Can you imagine the
/. effect pounding this thing? Urrrrgly!

> > I don't think that the author suffered any illusions about the
need for a
> > real copy of MS Office to drive the thing (in fact I think that
this was
> > his point.)
>
> Sure. But my point was that people that have to read MSOffice
documents don't
> necessarily have a running copy of MSOffice at hand - nor access to
a
> web-based gateway.

They may have access to Word Viewer, of course. Does
Word Viewer include macro support? Anyone?

> David.

I also note that there is a second use for this
gent's proposal:

[..]
> The MS Office applications are very good at reading
> MS files :-). Using VBA it should be easy to write
> some macro that would open a document, loop through
> the internal object structure (word, paragraphs...)
> and dump it in a format such as XML that any open
> source/free software could easily read.

Did it occur to anyone else that this would be a
godsend to filter developers? You'd actually be able
to compare specs (which MS *does* publish, btw) and
implementation. Again an automated system which
accepts Word files and spits out object diagrams
and information would be useful.

Another thing that may be useful is to compare
output-to-printer, probably by diffing PDF files
(skipping headers of course). This way we can
test:

Word files printed by Word versus printed by KWord.
Word files "" "" after having been translated to
KWord and back again.
A Word file printed in KWord
A KWord file printed in Word.


be well;

JC.

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