From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 23:50:39 EDT
--- Martin Sevior <msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:
Hi Martin.
> On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, [iso-8859-1] Andrew Dunbar
> wrote:
>
> > --- Omer Zak <omerz@actcom.co.il> wrote:
> > > Andrew Dunbar wrote in length about the awful
> > > situation of RTF support in various word
> > > prcessors and in AbiWord in particular.
> >
>
> I would just like to pointout that this would not
> solve our problem with wordpad and lists. Wordpad is
> fundamentally BROKEN. It screws up perfectly valid
> RTF.
>
> The spec says: "readers that recognize the
> \*\listtable keyword should ignore \*\pn keywords"
> WordPad puts in bullet or list number for both
> these contructs.
Thanks for the technical details. This is what I like
to see on a developer list (:
> So we could trivially solve this problem by NOT
> exporting the "\*\pn" construts but this would mean
> Word 95 and OO would not read in our lists
> as lists. Word 97 and Word 2000 does this.
I'm not sure I understand 100%.
Are you saying that Word 97/2K don't export the
"\*\pn" construts - and that they create RTF that
Word 95 cannot read in correctly?
This would mean a fundamental incompatibility between
Word 95 RTF and Word 97/2K RTF. (I'm ignoring the
standard for the moment).
> So solving the WordPad problem means throwing away
> backward compatibility with Word 95 and other
> readers.
If newer versions of Word have already done this
anyway
then I'm not sure that choosing "standard/word95" RTF
over "word97/2k" RTF is necessarily the only way to
proceed.
> Having a library would not solve this either.
Well it wouldn't solve the MS Word problems but it at
least has the potential to solve the problems with
other readers - at least open source ones. Otherwise
we're pretty much letting MS force problems onto us
and oo software in general.
> Regarding Andrew's proposal, I'm happy to donate my
> parts of the Abi RTF import/export of RTF to a (l)
> GPL'd library but I'm not particularly inclined to
> spend much time on it.
If it works out and I get a machine soon I'll do the
conversion myself.
> I have enough trouble working out how RTF should be
> imported into AbiWord without trying to solve the
> general problem of getting RTF imported/exported
> into any Word Processor.
It would just be a separation layer between parsing
and triggering the import logic. The code shouldn't
have to change very much in the initial conversion.
Andrew.
> Cheers
>
> Martin Sevior
>
>
>
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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