Alvin Murphy wrote:
I am in the process of biting the bullet and converting [from
WordPerfect] to OpenOffice (use Word Wizard to batch convert your wp
files to .doc, then the Oo batch conversion utility to get to the .sxw
format). Good luck.
Dr. Murphy-
This is a very good move. WordPerfect code is very antiquated, and its
spaghetti-type coding structure also makes it essentially impossible to
make any improvement without re-writing the entire program. Everytime
Corel programmers tried to do something, they always broke some
functionality.
A couple of my former WordPerfect buddies have started a project to
"work" WordPerfect into OpenOffice.org:
wp.openoffice.org
Currently, there are two major tasks: libwpd (to implement WordPerfect
functionalities in OpenOffice.org) and wpd2sxw (wpd to sxw filter). See
the following most recent communication:
libwpd:
0.5.0 -> 0.6.0
- Tibetan extended character support (Ted Lemon)
- Border-less table cell support (William Lachance)
- Support for some odd types of tables (William)
- Top/bottom margin change support (William)
- Header/footer support (William)
- Built-in filetype detection (William)
- Handle corrupt token (0x00) correctly (William)
- Code refactoring and bugfixes (William)
- Fix bug with long documents and tables (William)
wpd2sxw:
0.4.0 -> 0.5.0
- page margin support (top and bottom) (William Lachance)
- table bugfixes/additions (William)
- header/footer support (William)
- massive refactoring of the XML output generation: simpler, more robust
(William)
I will get back to this topic later. But as it has always happened,
once this project reaches certain milestones and receives some
publicity, we will begin to see a snowballing effect. The ability to
combine WordPerfect with OOo is perhaps one of the best things that
could happen to the Open Source movement.
