Subject: Re: msword doc bug
From: Robert Sievers (bob@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 10:08:03 CST
At 06:28 AM 1/19/00 +0000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, sam th wrote:
>> 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
There is a bug currently logged, #563, which speaks to part of this problem.
http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=563
It currently has no owner.
I realize that the bug being discussed is a little bit more broad than
#563, and if someone wants to go over the top by working on the auto-detect
mechanism, you sure won't get any complaints from AbiWord users.
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