From: r coyne (duckingsnofair@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 13 2002 - 23:30:42 EDT
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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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Jun 13 2002 - 23:32:37 EDT