Further report on Abiword/Ted M$Word compatibility. Charles: Yes, I neglected to mention M$Word's incompatibility with itself - a problem I, too, have encountered in the past. Another argument in favor of a third standard like .rtf as the test for a good wordprocessor for a distro like BL?
Today, I received some more short attachments to test opening with Ted and Abiword. This time, 2 were .doc files, and one was a .wpd file (Wordperfect). These were fairly simple documents - single page or 2 pages, with some font variation, centering and even columns in one of them. Ted mangled all of them pretty severely. The text of the original document could be read of course, but was all jumbled. It had strange symbols interspersed, as well as the path to the doc from the person's computer who composed it. There was some information in there about a printer, as well as "MSWord 8" (M$'s internal name for the Word version this person was using?). No font variations were in evidence. Abiword (again, 1.0.3) managed to open all in a fairly readable state. I was especially surprised at how good the .wpd document looked. Not all the formatting was correct, but it did not display the strange symbols Ted did, nor was the text noticeably jumbled. Same held for the 2 .docs I opened: formatting was obviously not what the author had intended (page breaks in inopportune places), but the text was readable and not jumbled, and there were no extraneous symbols inserted. It looked like a fair representation of what the author did with the text to begin with - apart from some obvious formatting errors. In one .doc, for example, the first page was blank except for a heading. Varied font sizes appeared, as did centered text and columns. I would say that, at this point, the score stands at; Ted - 1, Abiword 1 3/4 in terms of M$Word compatibility. If we take into account the miserable way both performed with the resume I wrote about earlier, we might change that to -1 3/4 and -1 (minus sign), respectively. Perhaps Abiword will preserve the overall look of M$Word docs better than Ted. But it's still not going to be fully compatible. James To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
