Subject: Re: Office converters
From: Sean Young (sean@mess.org)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 10:20:16 CST
On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 10:02:39AM -0600, Michael D. Pritchett wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Sean Young wrote:
> > Since the API is really simple, we could do the following:
> >
> > o Use the office importers in Abiword for Win32.
>
> This is not usually a good thing. Those that have Office already
> installed, generally don't need AbiWord. Still a plugin to allow usages
> of this items sounds like a good idea.
A vanilla Windows 98 install includes a Word importer/exporter, which
might work better than wvWare; also it would allow you to save to Word.
(Which is not a feature, IMHO.)
> > o Write our own office importer so that people using Word can save and
> > load Abiword files. New .cnv files are automagically added; all that
> > needs to be done is a create a standalone dll with the rtf importer
> > and exporter, re-write the API and we're in business.
> >
>
> I like this one. We could easily distribute to people that already have
> office so they could use .abw files without us having to convert for them.
> I don't know how successful it will be to get office users to do that, but
> it is a nice thought.
My thoughts exactly. Asking users to save as rtf is a bit of a pain. But
something along the lines of "Install this converter if you want to read
my abiword files or abiword itself" or "please install this converter and
save the file as abiword so that I can read them" might work quite well.
Then again, I'm not as good as Microsoft at marketing, so I have no idea
how willing users would be to do this.
Sean
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