KJD plugin advice works; importer and plugins

From: r coyne (duckingsnofair@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 13 2002 - 23:30:42 EDT

  • Next message: Stéphane Letourneur: "Image magik plugin with 1.0.2"

    Thanks to *you*, Kenneth J. Davis. Your advice about
    the plugins-incompatibility problem worked perfectly:
    I got rid of all the obsolete ones, downloaded and
    installed the two up-to-date packages from
    sourceforge, and Abi now starts up fine.

    As for the main problem, importing the Word document,
    I'm running out of time; unless someone comes up with
    a quick fix, I think I'm going to have to try to
    borrow somebody else's system with real Word on it
    tomorrow (which may not be easy considering that the
    editing I have to do will probably take quite a
    while). Eventually, I will file a Bug, as there
    doesn't seem to be one exactly like this yet -- there
    are some closely related ones, like crashing when you
    open a file type that Abi can't recognize at all, like
    a spreadsheet, or when you open *anything*. But I
    couldn't find anything specifically on Word docs. And
    this is different, not just the general point that the
    "formatter"/importer should do something other than
    crash when it has a problem. When the file is of a
    type that can be recognized and *mostly* handled OK
    (and .doc is certainly in this category, as Abi claims
    to be able to import Word files with only minor
    exceptions), it's important that the few problems not
    result in rejection (however polite) of the whole
    thing. Abi needs to open the file as best it can,
    alert the user to the existence of some
    uninterpretable parts, and offer some reasonable
    options, like simply ignoring those parts, or
    (ideally) showing a dump of them. The user may well
    be able to simulate the missing stuff in Abi; what one
    doesn't want is to have to recreate the entire
    document from scratch.

    The contents aren't terribly confidential, but are
    "sensitive" enough that I'd rather not send a copy if
    it isn't really necessary. When I get into the file,
    I may have a better idea what's being done in it. But
    it would be nice to know whether the import module is
    able to take advantage of plugins. If it can, that
    would pretty much rule out the images as the source of
    the problem, wouldn't it? If not, they'd still be my
    bet -- and this would be a rather general weakness in
    the program's design, that ought to be
    "fixed"/extended some day. Anyone know?

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