Subject: Re: msword doc bug
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 00:28:09 CST
On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, sam th wrote:
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> On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Elizabeth wrote:
>
> > ah actually its abiword that gives me the error when i try to reopen it
> > after making changes and saving
>
> The problem is what I originally thought it was. Abiword saves the file
> with a .doc extension. However, it saves it in .abw format. Then, when
> another program, be it Abiword or MSWord, attempts to open the file, it
> will think that it is a word document. To solve the problem in abiword,
> when opening the file, change the type from automatically detected to
> Abiword. Then it will recognize the file correctly.
>
> developers - this is a bug. It could be solved the way I solved bug 682,
> (see my recent post) by giving an error message saying that the file was
> claiming it was the wrong type, but if we are going to claim that we
> auto-detect types, we should actually detect them correctly, and not just
> blindly believe the extension.
>
It is a major bug. One of the complaints of my father is that he has to
use file extensions. Come on, people! This is the year 2000! The Macintosh
has had pure file name support since 1984. We've got an advanced kernel, a
comfortable desktop environment, but most software still relies on the
users to tell it the type based on the _file name_! AbiWord should use
magic numbers to detremine file types. I did a patch for midnight
commander recently implementing this, but I'm not sure I'd be able to do
it for AbiWord. It's worth a try :).
Aaron Lehmann
> > > sam th wrote: > >
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> > > On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Elizabeth wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > > I have no problems initially opening an msword document with abiword,
> > > > but when i edit the file and resave it i cannot reopen the file it gives
> > > > me the error "Error importing file"
> > >
> > > The problem here is that what you think is a word format file, isn't.
> > > Abiword does not currently export files in word format. Thus, Word sees
> > > the extension, thinks it's in word format, and then discovers that it is
> > > not.
> > >
> > > > also if i save the file as an abw i have no problems, but i would like
> > > > to keep it in its own format.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Since word cannot import .abw files (at least not that I am aware of), I
> > > would reccomend using RTF to maintain communication between these two
> > > programs
> > >
> > > > Elizabeth
> > > > elizhg@rmci.net
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > sam th
> > > sytobinh@uchicago.edu
> > >
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>
> sam th
> sytobinh@uchicago.edu
>
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