Subject: Re: Word Exporter Project
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 15:41:52 CST
At 03:18 PM 3/2/00 -0600, Justin Bradford wrote:
>Binary by default. The HTML mess is part of their web-integration
>(assimilation) effort. The idea being that one could write a document put
>it on the web (intranet), and them someone else could come along grab this
>document, import it into Word and then keep all of the "advanced"
>formatting/style info. Basically, it's to make doc->html->doc lossless.
Bingo. That's what I would have guessed. This is not their new default
file format, then. It's just an ugly Word/Web hybrid to help Office 2000
maquerade as an Internet product.
>Yes, an exporter would not be too difficult at this point. Time-consuming,
>but if you know the format, it's fairly straight-forward using the wv
>framework.
Cool. That's great news. On a proprietary development team, that might be
bad news -- who wants to be the lone coder stuck doing all that
time-consuming work? -- but one of the real strengths of Open Source
projects is the ability to grind through time-consuming tasks in a
distributed fashion.
If anyone's interested in organizing such an effort, speak up.
>True, the Word "XML" format is really not any better than the RTF format,
>as far as going from Abiword to Word is concerned. This defintely does not
>replace the need for a binary exporter, but it still doesn't mean it's a
>bad idea. As Word 2000 usage increases, support for this format could
>become increasingly important. However, when considering how it will
>likely be used by Word users (publishing to intra/internet), import of the
>format is probably more important than export.
Agreed. Definitely.
>There are probably more "important" things to work on, but it's not like
>supporting this format is bad. Maybe it will be a useful introduction to
>working on the binary format.
Sure. I think what got me so revved was the (mistaken) notion that anybody
might think this would *be* our solution for Word export in general. I
wanted to make sure we're not setting the wrong expectations.
The major feature we'll need is "real" Word (binary) export, and this isn't
it. This would just be an interesting waypoint for compatibility with
Word2000/Web documents (or whatever we want to call that monstrosity).
As long as we explain that this isn't "really" Word (binary) export, I'll
stop raining so hard on Sam's parade. :-)
>I'm going to write this stuff eventually, but until I have time, I'd be
>more than happy to point people to the relevant bits of documentation and
>code.
Thanks. I hope we find some volunteers to take you up on this offer. If
publicity would help, feel free to write up the first steps towards a binary
exporter as a POW, and we can start plugging it in AWN, etc. :-)
Paul
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