Thanks to *you*, Kenneth J. Davis. Your advice about the plugins-incompatibility problem worked perfectly: I got rid of all the obsolete ones, downloaded and installed the two up-to-date packages from sourceforge, and Abi now starts up fine.
As for the main problem, importing the Word document, I'm running out of time; unless someone comes up with a quick fix, I think I'm going to have to try to borrow somebody else's system with real Word on it tomorrow (which may not be easy considering that the editing I have to do will probably take quite a while). Eventually, I will file a Bug, as there doesn't seem to be one exactly like this yet -- there are some closely related ones, like crashing when you open a file type that Abi can't recognize at all, like a spreadsheet, or when you open *anything*. But I couldn't find anything specifically on Word docs. And this is different, not just the general point that the "formatter"/importer should do something other than crash when it has a problem. When the file is of a type that can be recognized and *mostly* handled OK (and .doc is certainly in this category, as Abi claims to be able to import Word files with only minor exceptions), it's important that the few problems not result in rejection (however polite) of the whole thing. Abi needs to open the file as best it can, alert the user to the existence of some uninterpretable parts, and offer some reasonable options, like simply ignoring those parts, or (ideally) showing a dump of them. The user may well be able to simulate the missing stuff in Abi; what one doesn't want is to have to recreate the entire document from scratch. The contents aren't terribly confidential, but are "sensitive" enough that I'd rather not send a copy if it isn't really necessary. When I get into the file, I may have a better idea what's being done in it. But it would be nice to know whether the import module is able to take advantage of plugins. If it can, that would pretty much rule out the images as the source of the problem, wouldn't it? If not, they'd still be my bet -- and this would be a rather general weakness in the program's design, that ought to be "fixed"/extended some day. Anyone know? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.
