The real reason is that Ruby is open-source, mostly volunteer, and most people who make things in Ruby don't tend to use Windows. For example, I am probably capable of writing something that would pass, but I've got other things to do and none of my clients are paying me to write a Word export. If I do need one, I'll write one or pay someone else to write it for me, or use the hacky Windows solution I outlined above. Thankfully, as you've suggested, I get my clients to agree to something less difficult to implement. RTF should be a fine solution.
I wonder what would happen if the OP generated RTF or HTML, gave it a .doc extention with the correct content type? I know an HTML table with the vnd-excel content type opens nicely in Excel. :) On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Marnen Laibow-Koser < [email protected]> wrote: > > Peter De Berdt wrote: > > On 29 Sep 2009, at 16:13, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote: > > > >>> OK... I Understand... > >>> But this is a requirement from my client... > >> > >> If it were my client, I'd be asking why. The fact that the client > >> excluded RTF suggests that the client is being unreasonable -- I can > >> think of no use case where RTF *shouldn't* be just as good an option > >> as > >> MS Word format. > > > > And to put it quite simple: the old Word format is a closed format and > > there is no rubygem available for reading or writing Word files on > > Linux since no one has gone through the effort of reverse engineering > > it (and there are more than enough alternative solutions available > > such as RTF and HTML). > > I believe you may be incorrect on the reverse-engineering part. Plenty > of other software reads and writes old MS Word files -- which means that > *someone* figured out the spec... > > > > > > > Best regards > > > > Peter De Berdt > > Best, > -- > Marnen Laibow-Koser > http://www.marnen.org > [email protected] > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
