Subject: Re: Word Exporter Project
From: Justin Bradford (justin@ukans.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 14:45:17 CST
> The Word 97-2000 format, which is the prevalent binary format, is none of
> the above. I have heard rumors of a Word 97 file format spec available,
> but have never been able to find one.
http://busboy.sped.ukans.edu/~justin/word/wword8.html
550Kb of documentation on the glorious Word binary format. I would
estimate that about 300-400Kb of it is actually right, too.
> This means that writing an exporter
> for the mess that is the Word 2000 XML wreckage is much easier than
> writing a binary exporter. It should not surprise anyone that all of the
> formats we export are text-based. Especially for a not-so-good programmer
> like me, this is a much more manageable task.
Regardless of the availability of the binary file format, I think it's a
good idea to work on this "XML" exporter. For one, Sam could probably have
a nice Word "XML" exporter (and importer for that matter) in a shorter
time than it would take to begin to understand the binary format.
And, theoretically, this could become an important format. And, at very
least it's another check in the features/compatiblity column...
Justin
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