Caption numbering created in MS Word

[Massachute246]

I am trying NeoOffice for the first time (as a possible replacement for Word 2004 for me), so forgive me if the answer to this question should be obvious. I haven't been able to find an answer searching this forum or the Wiki pages.

I have lots of documents with a lot of caption numbering fields in them. I actually recruited Word's caption numbering facility a long time ago to use for example numbering in technical manuscripts, since otherwise the example numbering got in the way of section and paragraph numbering -- but that's another story. The fact is, I have lots of documents with what Word thinks is caption numbering.

When I open these documents in NeoOffice, all the caption numbering fields are displayed as 0 (zero). The same documents in Word 2004 show correctly sequential numbering (1, 2, 3 etc.). Is there anything I can do to make these documents usable and correctly update the fields within NeoOffice?

[narf]

Unfortunately the most likely the problem is that NeoOffice cannot fully convert your document from Word format. While NeoOffice can accurately convert most documents, there are some documents that it cannot. Microsoft Word is a set of proprietary file formats so non-Microsoft applications like NeoOffice have had to reverse engineer Microsoft's file format. As a result, there can be a loss of formatting when opening a Word document in NeoOffice.

However, there is a chance that NeoOffice's Microsoft import filters may be able to handle this aspect of your document in our upcoming release. Can you attach a sample document that we can take a look at?

Instuctions on how to attach files to your post

--fran

[Massachute246]

Thanks for your reply. I'm attaching a document, as you requested.

[pluby]

Thank you for attaching a sample document.

Unfortunately, I have bad news. I tested your sample document in our latest NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access 2 release and the same problem occurs. I also checked out the following other applications and they also cannot handle the caption numbers:

1. OpenOffice.org 3.0 and 3.1 - Fails and all captions are shown as "65535"
2. Apple's TextEdit application - Fails and all captions are shown as " SEQ ( \* ARABIC 1"

So it seems that only Microsoft Office can understand these caption numbers.

Patrick

[Massachute246]

Thank you for checking on the problem.

I'm just curious though -- these are just MS Word fields, right? So is there a reason why NeoOffice (and evidently Open Office 3.0 as well) processes other types of fields correctly, but not these? (Hopefully an easily fixable reason...?)

[pluby]