[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
From:       Rob Landley <landley () trommello ! org>
Date:       2002-03-01 22:11:44
[Download RAW message or body]

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. Neither Eric nor I know much about Mac software.
> > |   > Neither of us knows whether there are any Mac programs that can
> > |   > edit Word documents, let alone would be able to troubleshoot Mac
> > |   > programs that claimed they could edit Word documents.
> >
> > As it was said in answer to your mail, MS Office for Mac, for sure, can
> > open files from MS Office/Windows.
> > I understand quite often your problem, as I (silently) started using
> > Linux at office, and from time to time colleague of me sends me as an
> > attachement .doc or .ppt, comes to my desk and says: "ok, let's look at
> > it together. Open my attachement"
> > At a moment, I have no choice but tell "wait a minute. I will save your
> > attachment to my disk and reload Windows".
> > It looks _stupid_, and I feel myself quite uncomfortable in such
> > situation.
>
> Thanks.  In my case, my personal machine at home is not dual-boot, so I
> couldn't even do that much.  We have a dual boot machine, but it's so slow
> I have hesitated even to attempt to use Windows on it.  :-(

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.

> > Anyway, I see positive moments even in such bad situation:
> > * few colleagus of me learned that there is something different existing
> > in the world, comparing to Windows.
> > * one of them started using ftp :-))
> > Ok, he is using now CuteFTP(Windows) but may be one day he will switch to
> > Konqueror.
> > * good motivation to promote PDF usage inside your office or with
> > partners.
>
> What does "PDF" mean?

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.

> > Despite all problems with WYSIWIG KWord 1.1 has, it's still great tool
> > for PDF generation.
>
> Is it? I have had very little time to experiment with KWord.  I have found
> it very good for documents that are essentially straight text, but somewhat
> frustrating if I need to format something like an outline, where different
> blocks of text are indented differently.  I have to post those comments to
> this group (and I apologize for not having done so yet).
>
> > Treat it in this way for now - commercial software generating PDF costs a
> > lot of money, and in many cases produces PDFs of not very high quality.
> > In particular, that software has problems with National Languages support
> > (Cyrillic, for example).
> > KWord uses Unicode, embeds fonts, etc., and so far (it's version for
> > KDE3) is free of font embedding/encoding problems with Cyrillic.
>
> That's good to know.

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

> > If I was in Publishing / Graphics Arts industry - this could be a good
> > reason to install at least one Linux workstation.
>
> At least if the publisher makes extensive use of Cyrillic.  :-)
>
> > BTW: I am now re-working several Product Datasheets from MS Word format
> > to KWord and/or HTML.
> > So far, process is going ok.
> > If you are interested - I can send you off-list original MS Word .doc
> > file. Just moving from Word to KWord reduced disk consumption from 31K to
> > 5K, which can be a HUGE disk space saving (and network BANDWIDTH saving)
> > in case you mail those datasheets to partners, and have a lot of them
> > (both datasheets and partners).
>
> Er, Vadim, I'm sure that's true.  But I don't understand how that is likely
> to affect me as a user.

It's very simple.

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.

> > 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.

> > FILTERS, *FILTERS* - that's what killing KOffice at a moment.

I agree 100%.

> > Well, problem is known, every month someone is asking "when Kword will
> > have MS Word Export filter" - but, as KDE/KOffice is a volunteer project,
> > we need either wait or submit patches. Or provide funding :-)

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...)

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...)

Just about the ONLY way to get a decent kword export filter for .doc files in 
a finite amount of time is to suck the appropriate code out of OpenOffice.  
I'm told that the openoffice code is pretty frightening, but my understanding 
is that word is worse.

> Please note that I have not criticized KWord on this basis.  The criticisms
> that began this thread are all based solely on my use of KPresenter, in
> which I began a new slide show that did not attempt to incorporate
> information from *any* Windows-based or Microsoft program.
>
> 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 (see below).

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...

> > Cathy, Eric: may be you should give a try to StarOffice/OpenOffice?
> > It's not available in "Download" version of my favourite Linux distro,
> > and I don't have it installed, but I guess you can download binaries from
> > OpenOffice.org.
>
> I *am* using Star Office (5.2).  I use it for word processing, because it's
> the only Linux app I've found so far that does an acceptable job of
> *editing* documents written in MS Word without ruining the formatting.  The
> process by which it allows me to handle documents from my office is a bit
> cumbersome, but usable.  I really must get Eric to put my comments about
> the other Linux apps I tried on his Web site with the Drag.net stuff... 
> :-)
>
> 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...

> Thanks for your comments, Vadim.  Take care.

Rob
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]