I have written and am testing a new version rewritten to be much
more useful to the abiword project, and its in the abisource cvs
tree named wv.
cvs checkout wv
So from the viewpoint of the wv library, the state of the art is..
This version currently can extract all the main body text out of word97
files in both fast and full save formats. It also can extract the correct
paragraph properties of these files.
I have a very simple importer for abiword which i havent in the tree yet,
but i'll stick it in tomorrow for perusal.
What i completed last night was what i believe is word 6 support to an
equal level of the described word 97 support. And today im going to take
a peek at word 95 (word 7). The problem there is that i have the word97 and
word 6 specification, but do not have the word 7 one, but i reckon that by
looking at the differences from one to the other i should be able to piece
together what I need.
In answer to "saving to word 6". Well that will be a bit tricky to say the
least, but technically doable, but I imagine that that support will only
come into existance when either I complete importing for the three big word
formats, (or get massively funded fulltime (hah!) ), or if someone else takes
up that task.
So i suppose the short answer is that the wv library that I hope abiword will
be using for word importation shortly will be able to handle word 6 and 97 files
and hopefully word 95. The quality of importation should be very high as all the
paragraph and character properties will be available, pending on the
availability of corresponding properties in abiword, but that saving to those
formats is only an aspirational goal of the wv lib. But that i'd like it to be
able to do it at some future point.
But thats only what the wv lib is at, the abiword folk might have a different
viewpoint on matters.
C.
Real Life: Caolan McNamara * Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie * Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan * Sig: an oblique strategy
Left channel, right channel, centre channel