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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: MS Office filters & Suns
From:       "Shaheed Haque" <shaheedhaque () hotmail ! com>
Date:       2000-06-13 17:53:46
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Let me try to summarise/clarify issues raised in this thread.

The original problem was a report that the Sun version of kword could not 
read Word files ("Re: [Fwd: kword: The tableStream is missing]"). I 
*speculated* that the reason *might* be an endianness issue in the OLE 
parsing code. Richard has since provided sample documents, and I hope to 
look at these now that I'm back on air.

However, that is not to say that that it is the OLE parsing code's job to 
read the document *content* correctly, that is obviously up to the actual 
filter code. FWIW, the Word filter code is intended to do this correctly on 
any platform (plus or minus bugs that might need fixing by me in exactly two 
affected functions at the top of mswordgenerated.cc).

Now, as for the Word file format, it is clearly stated by the Word spec that 
the on-disk encoding format is always little-endian. Thus, provided a 
particular version of the Word file format is supported by the filter, it 
will not matter if the document was written on a Mac or PC. Note that the 
Mac versions do contain Mac-specific data, but typically there is equivalent 
(or at least similar) data in the "canonical" PC-oriented structures.

So, the bottom line is that the Word filter should work equally well on a 
given Word document irrespective of the platform the document is being read 
on and (alomst) irrespective of the platform the document was written on.

Thus, once we work out the bug/misunderstanding as to why Richard's 
documents cannot be read, we should be able to fix the problem for all 
platforms.
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