Neville Cobb wrote (in Part):
> > Abiword or Kwork can open Ms Word files. Or you could just save them in RTF
> > which can be opened by anything. I my self am at Sixform an my school have a
> > windows NT network with word 2000 and there is not a drop of windows on my
> > box anymore.
> I've been using StarOffice spreadsheet and word. I use StarOffice and
> save as word97 and take it to work. I have even used word templates and
> they appear to be reasonable although not 100% compatibility (I guess
> you'd expect that).
I use a variety of MSWord and Excel platforms at a variety of different
sites and find that for WP docs the simplest system is to use RTF
formatting
while saving.
For Excel I would normally save in Excel 5 format, while one does lose
'some' of the formatting data, at least formulae, rows and columns are
correctly rendered.
> I've had limited success with StarOffice spreadsheet. I can read Excel97
> quite reasonably but going the other way I loose formatting such as
> color and some font attributes (but it was done).
To be expected I guess as most of these compatibity issues are the
result
of time consuming reverse-engineering.
> I have had no joy in transferring a spreadsheet to Kword it simply just
Haven't tried that as my transfer scheme relies on earlier versioning.
> The only thing that really limits the usability and inter changeability
> of StarOffice files is the lack of true type font access straight out of
> the box. I've been trying recently to add true type to StarOffice and it
> is not very easy to do. Having font compatibility with Word and Excel
> fonts would be a bonus. I know with Mandrake you can import ttf but this
> makes it available only to X and not StarOfice. The Mandrake function to
> make ttf available to X is great but it would be much better if it could
> flow on into StarOffice.
Have you noted that when you bring an Excel sheet into Starcalc that TTF
font rendering and information _IS_ retained and remains so when you
re-export.
What I have routinely done is 'convert' all Word docs to RTF and
spreadsheets
to Excel 5 formats. The rtf conversion has been most successful on docs
up to 512kb. Most of the 'sheets are much less than that and so far I
haven't had any problems.
A few weeks ago Larry Marshall and I discussed this problem on this
list. I managed to locate a utility to 'convert' TTF to Adobe-type
fonts. I've since re-installed my system from scratch and lost the
util. As I recall, I found it via a Google search on 'font converter'
Cheers
John
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