Ed Wilts said: > What can we say? When you're right, you're right. There are no good open > source translators out there - not even for MS Word. Every one I've > tested failed on trivial documents, and I gave up. Not even > StarOffice on Windows was anywhere close to usable a couple of months ago > and I bought Office XP for my home systems.
what can one expect? when MS themselves cannot make their own shit compadible with their own shit :) I've read lots of stories about MS word on win32 docs not being able to open on MS office on mac, or vise versa, a more extreme example, a few months ago a former co worker was writing his resume in word 2000, About half the people he sent the resume to could not open it(despite all of them running word 2000). And this guy was no idiot, he was/is a very smart guy who has a lot of experience on MS platforms(and other platforms as well. Even a couple people in the same office(using the same MS office cd to install), had problems opening the document! While others, had no problems. In the end he had to use some $500 software package to export his document to PDF(maybe there was another way but thats what he chose). Meanwhile I provide my resume(being unemployed too) in .DOC, .TXT(CRLF & LF), .PDF, .PS, .HTML, .RTF, and .SXW and never had a problem:) of course it was written in star office 6(though I do admit I had to do some changes to the HTML version to make it have better formatting, even though it was easily readable it wasn't as clean). I purchased staroffice 6 to show support for open office, its easier for me then filing bug reports(and I cannot program). I agree that compadiblity with MS documents is important, but if the company who makes it(I'm sure some quick google searches will turn up hundreds of results like the time I think they released an update to office 97 so it could write documents readable in office 95) can't accomplish the task of making a portable document format accross their very own products, how can anyone else expect to achieve 100% compadibility? I think longer term, the solution is not to work with them, but design a good open format. But before we even try to impose this format on the rest of the world, the open source/free software suites need to support it fully. Sofar I haven't noticed any activivies on the parts of openoffice/staroffice, koffice, abiword, and others to even start on such a format unfortunately. And no XML by itself isn't good enough, all XML is a buncha tags, it can't be decoded and displayed right unless everyone knows what all the tags mean. I mean, Zope can export my websites to XML, fat chance that I'll be able to load them in openoffice though! I look forward to that day, if it ever comes! despite all that though I still love linux and have been MS-free for more then 4 years, after having used their stuff for more then 8 years. nate -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
