On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 14:42 -0500, Eric G Rothoff wrote:
> Dear Sirs,
>   I really like Open Office, but on some of my older computers, Open 
> Office uses to much resources, so on those computers I have started to 
> use Abiword. (Another opensource word processor.) Abiword has a plugin 
> for reading/writing ODT files, but Open office doesn't have the ability 
> to read/write ABW files. (At least I could not find it.) As it's file 
> format is opensource, could you not easily add support for that file 
> format as well? We complain about Microsoft not opening it's file 
> format, yet we don't use all the open formats that are available. Is 
> that right? (BTW, I have suggested to Abiword that they put the ODT 
> support into the main code instead of a plugin. They said that it would 
> take alot of work. With both your and their software being opensource 
> and freely available, I can not see how it should be that hard.

The specification for Open Documents is 800 pages long. Think how much
work that implies for redesigning a word processor to meet that
specification. Its probably not that far off starting from scratch. OOo
has very limited developer resources. If Abiword has ODF support it
means documents will transfer well between OOo and Abiword so why put
very scare resources into something that is a lot of effort for
relatively small return?

Ian
-- 
www.theINGOTS.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk
www.opendocumentfellowship.org

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