Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:03 am Post subject: Newbie here - please be kind!
I am a big NeoOffice fan and have it on my mac at home (hence being in this usergroup) and in the process of trialing Openoffice for use with students at the college where I work.
One thing hit me - and I don't know if you can do anything about this - but while Openoffice and NeoOffice seem to open anything and save as anything they do seem to have a problem with MS / Apple Works files. MS Word has the same problem and we have a heck of a problem reminding students to save their work as .doc files.
If we had a few computers with Openoffice on / Macs with NeoOffice that COULD open Works files if students came in with wrongly saved files we would be fireproof.
This would save a lot of tantrums and panic on assignment handing in days I can tell you!
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:36 am Post subject:
To open/save Works documents, either MS Works or AppleWorks, would require reverse engineering their proprietary file formats. We haven't really had the resources to do that, and reverse engineering file formats correctly is something of an art form. That's why the guys in Hamburg who did StarOffice/OOo are really slick. If the MS Office import/export wasn't as good, I doubt you'd see OOo/SO as popular as they are.
While I really can't rule anything out, I can say at least that I'm not certain if I'll personally be doing any file format reverse engineering in the near future. While the AppleWorks ones may not interest OOo, you may want to bring up MS Works. Since theyr'e targeting small office/home users with StarOffice, it very well may be something they're already looking into. Someone else may be as well (as with the WordPerfect filters) but I just don't know of anyone.
While the AppleWorks ones may not interest OOo, you may want to bring up MS Works. Since theyr'e targeting small office/home users with StarOffice, it very well may be something they're already looking into. Someone else may be as well (as with the WordPerfect filters) but I just don't know of anyone.
StarOffice ships with a number of proprietary import filters, and it wouldn't surprise me if MS Works was among them. So Sun has no interest in creating new filters (the WordPerfect filters were in the same boat, thus libwpd was born).
However, just the other day someone posted a message on libwpd-devel stating that he had started work on an import filter for MS Works and was beginning to reverse-engineer the format. Fridrich Strba, who got libwpd integrated into OOo, promised to help integrate this new library once it was ready.
AbiWord's Hubert Figuiere started a project to reverse-engineer the Claris/AppleWorks formats, but I think he gave up on it.
In a pinch, DataViz's MacLinkPlus should be able to translate most files into an intermediate format Neo can read (see Opening AppleWorks documents in the wiki for our coverage of that format), but built-in, supported filters would be better
Cheers to all the folks working on reverse-engineering these formats!
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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