Subject: Re: Word Exporter Project
From: Emile Snyder (emile@reed.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 11:41:57 CST
I queried Caolan on this list quite awhile ago about best ideas for adding
export to wv, and got some nice pointers, downloaded the library and
started messing around. What I ran into was the lack of a stable OLE2
library. libole2 is around, and looks like it will be quite nice, but
still wasn't creating/writing new ole2 files when I last looked. I poked
around in the library a little bit, but ran out of time :( But getting wv
to output looked pretty straightforward, if rather tedious, once there was
a nice ole2 output capable library. It seems that the primary authors of
libole2 were involved in the laola stuff, which has some write capacity
(not sure of stability issues) but which is no longer being maintained.
libole2 is in the gnome CVS tree, but I can't find a homepage for it,
sorry.
Where did you find the info on this new/weird format? Do you know what
the earlies Word version is which supports it?
I agree that it would be a very nice hack, but I'm concerned that it's one
of the 'only the newest versions of Word please' kind of things. But only
the newest is definitely better than none!
-emile
On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, sam th wrote:
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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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