Re: [ros-dev] Microsoft Office files in the trunk

[Michael B. Trausch]

Mike Swanson wrote:
[snip]
> > >   
> >  You do not need to feel strongarmed into using
> > Impress' file format.
> >  You can save it in Impress' file format as well as exporting it to
> >  Microsoft's PowerPoint format.  Just an idea. 
>  
>  Just because Impress supports PowerPoint documents, doesn't meant it's
>  complete or perfect. Just like the DOC (Word) and XLS (Excel) formats,
>  it's secret and must be reverse engineered. And similar to DOC and
>  XLS, the non-Microsoft parsing of them changes between free software
>  programs. Sometimes better in some documents, sometimes worse in
>  other. Hell, sometimes it's impossible to see what the document was
>  even intended to look like (eg, the MS Word-created flyer I was trying
>  to see)
>   
I understand.  Perhaps I didn't say what I was meaning to:  If OO.o is
used to generate the document, OO.o will parse it the same way.  I was
saying that if the proprietary formats are "needed," then OO.o can save
them -- interoperability works nearly perfectly, IME, going from OO.o to
Office, however, coming back from the other direction seems to break
with documents with more advanced formatting.  While I'm sure they're
working on it, I try to avoid them, anyway.  I hate proprietary stuff,
and avoid whenever possible.  (And no:  I'm not quite as bad as some
people on the subject, such as RMS.)

	 - Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                      fd0man(a)gmail.com
AIM: MB Trausch                             Jabber:  mtrausch(a)jabber.com