Star Office (.sdw) export and import missing

mahowi · Red Pill Joined: Mar 03, 2009 Posts: 9 Location: Germany

I miss the star office 5 file formats in the save file and open file dialogs in NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access 2 Patch 1.

In OpenOffice 3.01 import and export of these file formats is available.

Thanks for any explanations.

Marcus

James3359 · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 9:19 am Post subject:

AFAICT import of Starwriter 5 documents is available via File>Wizards>Document Converter.

Export does not appear to be possible. If export is important to you, maybe you can work round this limitation by exporting to another file type which Starwriter can import.

Samwise · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 9:31 am Post subject:

I can see this issue in NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access 2 Patch 1 too. The file formats are available for export in NeoOffice 2.2.5 and OOo 3.0.1.

I do not have a Mac version of ooo-build to test. Can someone who has access to one test ehether the formats are also missing in ooo-build?

shades · Keymaker Joined: Aug 18, 2005 Posts: 96

Yes, in OO.org 3.0.1 (Mac) we can save in .sdw format (for each version of StarOffice). However, in NeoOffice 3.0 Patch 2 those options are not available.

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Off-topic question: What is Unified Office format (.uot), which is the last save option in both NeoOffice 3 and OO.org 3?

Samwise · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:05 pm Post subject:

shades · Keymaker Joined: Aug 18, 2005 Posts: 96

Thanks. Looks like an attempt to merge them will not really happen, even though they were/are trying to do the same thing. I wonder if Chinese is the base issue, and the basis for differing decisions during the document definition phase.

OPENSTEP · Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2009 9:12 am Post subject:

Thanks for noticing this. I'll look and see if there's anything that sticks out at me about why those exporters are missing. It may be an ooo-build change.

Yeah the UOF format was made a while back by China. In general, China has a penchant for making their own standards for many things. That document format as well as the modifications to the 802.11 wireless networking standard come to mind. By doing that, they wind up being able to require products to license and implement their standards in order to be sold in China. I guess the theory is that this means they don't have to pay patent royalties for formats used elsewhere in the world (e.g. BluRay). It also may give Chinese companies a slight "leg up" on the international competition for local markets, but I don't think that actually happens.

ed

shades · Keymaker Joined: Aug 18, 2005 Posts: 96

I wonder, too, if the language direction options (RTL, LTR, UpDown) of Chinese requires more for document specification? Although I think Nisus and Mellel handle them. I donâ€™t know Chinese, but I use Hebrew (RTL).

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I have some good news about this issue. Ed created bug 3426 for this issue and I think that I have fixed this bug.

The bug was caused by Novell's Go-oo modications to the OpenOffice.org bug. For some reason, the Go-oo modifications disable support for the old StarOffice 3.0 through 5.0 file formats. Fortunately, the code for these file formats is grouped in only two places in the OpenOffice.org code so I was able to tweak the NeoOffice 3.0 build to override the Go-oo modifications and add back support for these file formats.

Unfortunately, I cannot use our patching mechanism for this bug fix so I cannot provide a test patch for you to test. But I will include the fix in the upcoming NeoOffice 3.0 release.

Patrick

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. The fix has been included in today's NeoOffice 3.0 release and NeoOffice 3.0 is now available for Early Access Members from the Early Access Program download page.

Patrick