Subject: Word Exporter Project
From: sam th (sam@bur-jud-118-039.rh.uchicago.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 11:44:33 CST
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One of the features that we need most in order to be compatible with the
rest of the world is a MS Word exporter. Unfortunatley, all their file
formats are binary, making them hard to generate. However, just for
laughs, Microsoft decided that instead of dealing with HTML as a lossy
format compared to Word documents, they would just extend the language
instead. The result is probably the ugliest documents you will _ever_
see. However, they are plain text, and reasonably well specified. Thus,
I would like to start a project to get an exporter going.
Some initial notes - more info later today
1 --------
As this format is essentially HTML, with lots of extensions via an
extended version of XML, we can just work of the HTML exporter. This
gives us a big leg up, in that it means that the basic document structure
is done for us.
2 -------
This file format is specified. I have posted a bunch of .doc files
(readble in AbiWord) to my website at
http://bur-jud-118-039.rh.uchicago.edu/abiword/msword/
These lay out in a bunch of psuedo-DTD's the format. However, these can
only serve as a rough guide. I have also posted, to the same location, 3
files in this format. One is very short, and the other two are quite
long. The first step should be to be able to reproduce the short
document.
3 ------
This is a very rich format. AbiWord specifies nowhere near the amount of
formatting that this is capable of. Therefore, our job will NOT be as
hard as it looks from the long documents.
4 ------
This will be very useful. If we can export a native or near-native word
file format, we are almost at full compatibility. Once we do this, people
will be much more able to replace Word with AbiWord in a Word enviroment.
And it would be a cool hack. I know of no other word processor that
exports this format (besides word).
Hope some people are willing to help on this.
sam th
sytobinh@uchicago.edu
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