Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 9:16 am Post subject:
OOo does not have a file filter for Mac Word 5.1 formatted documents. Since it was designed for Win32 boxes, no one has reverse engineered that old Mac file format. Do you have any pointers on where we could find details of that file format?
The earliest version of Word documents that can be imported at this time is Word 6.0, when Mac Office switched to using PC compatible file formats.
MS Office for windows has a filter for Mac Word 5.1 but I'm not a programmer
I still use MSWord 5.1 for mac because I think is better than the 6 ...
what do you need to translate a file format?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 8:55 am Post subject:
I do agree on the using Word 5.1 issue. It really is a nice program Simple and to the point. There's been talk of adding on a Word 5.1 clone interface (whenever we get around to it...more like after a first Aqua release).
Well, unfortunately to write a translator for Word 5.1 you either need to get a description of the full file format (highly unlikely, since it's Microsoft proprietary information) or need to sit down and reverse engineer the format (e.g. when I "bold" a word, these bits change, when I add a graphic these bits get added, the graphics are stored in format "blah", here's the layout of a table header, etc.). The reverse engineering's made diffiult due to the fact it's all in binary. I know the shared file format didn't come into play until Word 6.0, so I'm unsure of the drift away from Win32 in previous versions, but suspect it to be more then endian since they were different codebases.
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