*update* Actually, after clicking on Okay for the MS Word 08 error message, Word offered to 'recover' the file it was trying to open, and appears to have opened it fine with nothing missing that I can see, though it claimed some 'unreadable content'.
I will follow this up if I can see what content it hasn't included - it's a complex doc and there may be images etc. missing.
- padmavyuha
*further update* There is no apparent difference at all between the opened .docx in MS Word 08 and in NeoOffice v3.0, once you get past the MS error messages - this is in a doc with tables, images, headers/footers.
However, trying to open the .docx in MS Word 04 (with docx converter installed) fails completely, no recovery offered.
If I save the docx in Word 08, Quicklook now works fine with it - so something is definitely askew with the .docx exporter in NeoOffice v3.
Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 4:31 am Post subject: QuickLook and docx (as saved by NeoOffice)
I'm using Neo 3.0 and I can confirm exactly the same behavior.
If Neo saves a document in .docx, QuickLook just shows an icon. If you open the .docx with Word it has to rebuild it. Make the same document in Word and save it as .docx, Quicklook works fine.
Save it in .doc and QuickLook works fine.
I was just logging in to report the same issue when I spotted this post.
Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:38 am Post subject: Re: Neo v3.0 export to .docx bugs
yoxi wrote:
Following a comment from someone on MacUpdate, I've confirmed that after saving a Writer doc as a .docx file in NeoOffice v3.0:
i) QuickLook cannot view the contents of the .docx, and
NeoOffice's QuickLook plugin only provides support for OpenOffice.org documents. We have never written or proposed adding support for Microsoft Office documents in our QuickLook plugin as those file formats are supposed to be supported by Apple's and Microsoft's plugins.
So, if you are not seeing any QuickLook support for .docx files and you have Microsoft Office 2008 installed, then you need to file a bug with Microsoft.
If I save the docx in Word 08, Quicklook now works fine with it - so something is definitely askew with the .docx exporter in NeoOffice v3.
Like NeoOffice 2.2.5, NeoOffice 3.0 uses software from an open source project called "odf-converter" to export to the Microsoft Office 2007 format.
Unfortunately, the odf-converter code has several very large limitations that cause formatting loss when saving in the Microsoft Office 2007 format. Because of this, NeoOffice treats those Office file formats as experimental so you get the dialogs to highlight the fact that those file formats are not the preferred format.
It is not likely that the odf-converter project will ever support more than the bare minimum of the those file formats so we recommend that users save in either the native NeoOffice .odt file format or, if compatibility with Microsoft Office is needed, save in the older Word 97/2000/XP .doc file format which has much more robust export code.
Unfortunately, our very limited funding and developer resources limits the current scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X and fixing odf-converter bugs is outside that scope.
Although we cannot fix odf-converter bugs, we can file a bug for you in the odf-converter issue tracker to get it on the radar of the core odf-converter developers and if they fix the bug, the new behavior will get included in a future release of NeoOffice.
If you want us to file a bug with the odf-project, please attach the following two sample files:
1. The original document saved in .odt format
2. The same document saved in .docx format
I note that a .docx doc saved from MS Word 08 thinks it's a Word 08 doc (in Show Info), whereas one exported from NeoOffice thinks it's an OpenOffice doc. Changing it to MS Word 08 changes the display icon, but doesn't help Quicklook of course...
I note that a .docx doc saved from MS Word 08 thinks it's a Word 08 doc (in Show Info), whereas one exported from NeoOffice thinks it's an OpenOffice doc. Changing it to MS Word 08 changes the display icon, but doesn't help Quicklook of course...
narf or I will take a look at the files. As for QuickLook, you may need to reboot before Mac OS X updates which QuickLook plugin to match the changes you made as the Finder caches a lot of the QuickLook data to speed up rendering.
Thanks - as for Quicklook, after changing the (oh, it's the middle of the night and I can't remember the technical term, assigning the doc to a different application in Get Info) and then a restart, QL still can't read the Neo-generated .docx doc.
Thanks - as for Quicklook, after changing the (oh, it's the middle of the night and I can't remember the technical term, assigning the doc to a different application in Get Info) and then a restart, QL still can't read the Neo-generated .docx doc.
Hmmm. I did a quick Google search and many links echo the problem in the following thrad:
One superficial thing I noticed is that in the version saved by Neo, the file contents are stored in the .zip roughly backwards. I wonder if Word (and, similarly, Apple's "Office document Quick Look plug-in" is expecting, e.g., [Content_Types].xml to be the first file within the zip? A version re-saved by TextEdit does have [Content_Types].xml first, I see (and QL works on it).
Word's version is also 50% larger (12,734 vs 8,112 bytes), so the problem may really be there...I haven't tried comparing actual sub-file contents. (Then again, the version re-saved by TextEdit is even smaller, 3,825 bytes, but Quick Look actually works on it! I don't have Word.)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
FYI. I can reproduce this same bug using the odf-converter project's latest version running on Windows XP so this is clearly an odf-converter bug so I have filed the following bug with the odf-converter project:
Thanks Patrick - by the way (for completeness), .docx files created in 2.2.5-patch-8 have the same issues, but I assume that's because 2.2.5 is using the same version of the odf-convertor.
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