Re: loading binaries

From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Wed May 28 2003 - 02:51:38 EDT

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    Hi Andrew,

    > I'm with Dom. If we fix all these bugs, we will also
    > be able to handle arbitrarily corrupted documents.
    >
    This is not about handling corrupted documents; this is about not
    trying to layout as text something that is not text. Even the text
    importer assumes that what is being loaded contains some kind of
    layout information and it interprets it, so when you load a binary
    into AW, you actually do not see what the file contains, you see what
    the text importer thought its interpretaion was. This gets
    particularly messy if the file gets loaded as anything else than 8-
    bit latin1 text; remember, we shape it, replace ligatures, reorder
    the contents according to the Unicode bidi algorithm, etc.

    The bottom line is that AW is not designed to view binary files and
    so it should not prettend it can; the fact that Word cannot tell text
    form binary is a bug in Word, not something we should rush to
    emulate.

    Tomas



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