Translators

rayjay · Captain Joined: Jun 15, 2007 Posts: 50 Location: UK

It would be great if Neooffice could open more of the old and now unsupported Mac formats, in particular MacWrite of various flavours and ClarisWorks. Just look at Apple forums to see how many people are struggling with old documents they can no longer read.

ovvldc · Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2007 2:18 pm Post subject:

Several old formats are supported by NeoOffice: Word 95, Wordperfect 4.2, 5.1 and 6-12 and .wps. You can find the complete list on the NeoWiki. PDF import is being worked on.

However, all of these are courtesy of external libraries and writing the filters falls outside the scope of NeoOffice. Feel free to write an import filter that convert Clarisworks document to OpenDocument. That is not a trivial task, but I think the Patrick and the people at oo-build will happily incorporate it.

best wishes,
Oscar

rayjay · Captain Joined: Jun 15, 2007 Posts: 50 Location: UK

Thanks. I knew about the formats that can be imported - I just hoped someone might take on the job, which is beyond me I'm afraid, of extending the list.

ovvldc · Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2007 3:47 am Post subject:

I think Smokey Ardisson is the man to ask about existing projects in this field, but I am sure he would have mentioned something if he knew - we get this request with some regularity.

Best wishes,
Oscar

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

Yeah, at one point Hubert Figuiere (of AbiWord fame, and now working for Novell on pptx support) was working on a libcwk to import Claris/AppleWorks word processing documents, but since there were absolutely no document format specs anywhere, it quickly became too giant of a task. You can see what's there in cvs at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/libcwk.

By contrast, the WordPerfect importer (libwpd) was able to benefit from WPCorp/Novell/Corel's available documentation[1], a large community supplying documents and occasional patches, a series of three lead developers (William, Marc, and Fridrich, and Ariya working on libwpg) whose time has overlapped and kept the project going, and a real motivation on the part of the leads to work on the project (for the last few years, it's been Fridrich's desire to make libwpd surpass the quality of the proprietary WP filter Sun ships, so libwpd now converts every known WP file format and has stellar quality of conversion for WP6, WP5, and WP3 (Mac) documents).

All of which to say it's an incredible task, too much for one person usually, and requires a motivated developer. Hub's code is out there, so if someone can find a developer to pick it up--and I think in the coming years as AppleWorks dies more strongly that *might* be easier--there's always a chance. For now, however, the best way of getting AW/CW documents into NeoOffice is to use the methods described in the wiki.

Smokey

[1] Oh, the irony. Novell once owned WP, and is now paying [personal projects time] someone (Fridrich) to work on an importer library for WP files Wink