On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 19:29:17 PM -0500, Peter Kupfer OOo
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> >I do believe, however, that the sponsors of OpenOffice would do
> >well to remember how Microsoft succeeded in displacing WordPerfect
> >as the market leader in word processing. Among other things, they
> >made certain that users could import complex WordPerfect documents
> >into Word with very little disruption in formatting.
[...]
>
> The only way it is going to get better though is that when
> incompatibilities like this come up, people need to report them.
>
Just a comment: reporting is often simply NOT possible in the right
way, that is filing an issue with the document causing the problem
attached to it, or put online. Because many of the things not
converted perfectly (*complex* formulas or tables) are found in patent
applications, internal financial reports and similar things that you
just *cannot* send outside the company.
This is my case. To send them out, I should either cut and alter the
file so much that it becomes meaningless as a bug report, or spend at
*least* half a day to create a .doc version with entirely new/bogus
content which still shows the same problem: same approximate length,
same combination of troubling elements (assuming I know *beforehand*
what they are!!!), etc.... And to do this I should have access to a
Windows/MS Office machine, which I haven't.
So it is a self-perpetuating problem: incompatibilities show up
exactly in those areas which would be vital to convert PHBs, but
cannot be legally disclosed to fix the problem.
Maybe when MS displaced WP as the original poster said it was
objectively simpler, in the sense that text files could not be as
complicated and bloated, formatting wise, as they are today, I don't
know. But I'm pretty sure that several big incompatibilities which MS
and OpenDocument cannot be studied and fixed properly for the very
reason above, not because users are lazy and there are few developers.
Ciao,
Marco F.
--
Marco Fioretti mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/
Reality is for those who lack imagination
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
