[unrev-II] More on OpenOffice

From: Jack Park (jackpark@thinkalong.com)
Date: Tue Oct 23 2001 - 07:17:26 PDT

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    Some problems on the MS filters for OpenOffice are discussed at
    http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3857/1/

    Excerpt:

    "In order to get the answers on why users were experiencing problems with
    Word filters in OpenOffice Writer, I decided to go to the source itself and
    dropped a line to Juergen Pingel, who is the project owner for the word
    processor project in OpenOffice. He kindly referred me to Dublin-resident
    Caolán McNamara who is the filters developer for Writer.
    McNamara answered my questions about what exactly was going on with these
    issues and even pointed me to a pretty good document explaining how the
    overall filtering process works. He did this in favor of giving me a
    description of the process himself, which he characterized as" a set of
    incredibly complex mind-numbing processes to find text, graphics, and
    attributes in a Word document to map them to our own document features."
    Still, if you have an interest in this sort of thing, I recommend you go
    peruse that filtering document. It's a good read.
    When I asked McNamara about loss of formatting in Word documents, he was
    understandably hesitant to speak directly to the problem, since he had not
    seen the documents I was referring to. But, he did point to one of three
    main possibilities. First off, he conceded that formatting loss could be
    caused by a bug in the filtering process since the sheer complexity of
    mapping document features from one format to another could lead to the
    occasional error.
    Secondly, he stated that formatting loss or changes would occur in a
    situation what Word had a document feature that OpenOffice did not yet
    support. If there is nothing to map a feature to, then, the next best
    alternative will be displayed.
    Finally, the formatting changes could be a conscious decision on the part
    of the OpenOffice team. "Sometimes a Word layout misfeature... is so alien
    to common sense that it just isn't supported," he explained. "

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