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Abiword, wvWare And KWord Authors To Collaborate
An anonymous reader writes: "One important aspect of Free software is open collaboration and the pooling of efforts. There are several open source word processors available and they all need to import and export the ubiquitous MS Word format. To try and avoid duplicating efforts, developers from the Abiword, wvWare and Kword projects have been talking with regard to pooling their efforts in
writing filters."
But seriously, what good does .doc format do for _anyone_? Take away the fact that g00ns all over the planet use word, and you're left with nothing.
.doc filters are a technical solution for a social problem.
IMHO,
Personally, I use XEmacs to write all my papers in various SGML DTD's, and I couldn't be happier.
This just in! Open Source developers realize they're after a common goal, and decide to cooperate and combine efforts!
:)
(it's about bloody time
Idon't understand why the makers of Office-like applications haven't done like the CAD-business. They created the OpenDWG alliance in order to reverse-engineer Autodesk's proprietary .dwg-format for storing CAD-drawings and succeeded with the task. Mabye an OpenDOC (no pun intended, apple) alliance would speed up the acceptance and usability of open alternatives to MS-Office.
Mikael
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Most commonly used to parse (unambiguous computer) languages, but a word file is alot less complicated then a language I can assure you :)
Actually, I would estimate the complexity of the Word format as greater than that of the English language (even including all the variants). It's the most incomprehensibly complicated, poorly documented (and frequently misdocumented), train wreck of a file format in the history of this universe, which no one could ever possibly hope to merely even make hypothetical conjectures at its actual implementation. It is a manifestation of evil; there is no other explanation. (By the way, I have code in wvWare.)
hawk
Another advantage of this approach would be that all the word processors could use the same (or a very similar) filter to and from other non-*nix software. Sounds like a good idea to me.
BTW, doesn't Open Office use a compressed XML file to store it's documents? I thought I read something about Word2K using XML as well, but I could be wrong there. All that being said to say this: Isn't one of the promises of XML supposed to be improved sharing of data? This could be a good use...
Am I the only Slashdoter here who knows that KWord has been using XML as it's native format since the beginning? Honestly, you can try this yourself.
1. Create a file.kwd in KWord. Make it complex and add pictures and stuff.
2. Rename it to file.tgz
3. Uncompressed and untar it and viola, you have an XML document and a bunch of picture files etc...
The rest of KOffice works this way. Negotiations are still on to get all the Free office suites on Linux to unite on a single file format. I like the KOffice scheam because it inherently produces small files (already compressed). Others have favorites.
As for filters. I think we should have a separate program for importing the dreaded *.doc files and have all the office suites call this program for that task. Why should they all waste time redoing the same function that we would prefer not be needed at all? (I.e. MSWord not so cumbersome and convoluted in it's document formats)
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
IMHO, antiword is by far the best Word-to-Ascii converter out there. It even renders footnotes, can be used in pipes and is much faster than wvWare. The program is GPL and comes for a variety of OS platforms. As the moderator of a mailing list, I regularly use it to convert *.doc attachments. (One should patch majordomo so that it automatically filters *.doc attachments through antiword. It has worked flawlessly for me since more than a year. It surprises me quite a lot that such a superb program is so litte known in the Free Software community.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
This is all well and good (and I used to do it myself at school, where I am more or less justified in demanding that stuff be available to Unix users). However, using linux at work is very different. If everyone you work with is using some MS crap, the only way you can reasonably expect people to let you keep using linux is if you don't cause any hassle for anybody else. This means converting the docs yourself, either using your owm copy of MS Word (which was installed on the partition of your disk that you shrank to make room for a linux or BSD system :).
I was in that position last summer, and I had to use Wine (for Lotus Notes, which is actually an interesting program), and boot into windoze every now and then to use excel. Lotus Notes mostly works with wine, and has an excel and word viewer, so that saved some rebooting. Converters like antiword are also useful. I sent stuff to other people in HTML format or just ASCII email, since the stuff I had to write was only stuff like short reports on technical stuff. I would have pulled out LaTeX and made a PDF if necessary.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
It is also deep structure. Abiword ,for eg, also uses xml to markup its content but the resulting file resembles html much more than it does "data marked up with meaning" which is the essence of xml/sgml.
/own/ dtd and associated style sheets / xslt transforms etc. This /can/ be done - see wordperfect 2000. Not perfect but pretty damn good. generates xml output that conforms to your dtd.
Problem that requires solving is not to replicate the type of replacement but to alter the interface of wordprocessors so that they allow you to highlight structures such as chapters and sub chapters, and so forth. None are offering this at all.
They don't allow you to apply your
The current free offerings perpetuate the visual only representation of data.
While its true that with some farting around you can write additional xsl to transform simple markup ito something else, in practice this hard: you have to make assumptions like when you see this means insert another etc. Always breaks.
You may as well stick to html with embedded css if you don't allow external dtds.
Jonathan
XMl is just _not_ "fancy". It is a step in the direction of machine-readable "meaning".
HTML is a visual markup language concentrating on the concept of bigger and larger fonts, laying out the page etc.
XML does not inherently define layout - but it does allow at least one further tool to make layout happen. Typically this is xslt (there are others) and the output will probably html but could equally by more xml, rtf, pdf, ascii, csv, sql etc etc.
You *use* the processing lang you already know to manipulate the xml data. Thus all the biggies have or are soon to get the tools needed to use xml.
Thus you transform xml using an xslt processor itself written in java, python or c.
XML's implementation often proves the point that standards are often best written slightly afterthe fact but it really is usable now in a way that seemd very distant only a few years ago when the hype was *really* crazy
But why not also see if they can also inlist Open Office. We that is if they will play nice.
Now the other 100.000 Open Source / GPL projects should do the same and finally produce a production quality application suite...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
So there would be 3 different efforts still, but they would share knowledge with each other.
So what will they do when MS.net is up and open and people are using that?
Just imagine MS having access to your internal internet....
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
How can the Slashdot editors criticize web-porn filters and Napster filters for blocking the wrong people when they do it themselves?
Dump the braindead heuristics. If you really want to curb AC abuse, make it so that AC posts don't appear on the main page until a logged-in user "adopts" the post and any karmic moderation that gets done to it.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
C/C++/Java whatever. Doesn't it make sense to make something like a document transformer into a small CORBA service, talk XML for the result document and then we don't have the non-sensical language wars. I don't need to know that the document tranform was coded in language X. I just want it to work dammit.
Playing catch-up doesn't help set standards or even acquire market share
You're right. What I'm imagining is similar to what happened when the IBM PC BIOS was reverse-engineered: once we have very good compatibility, we can set the new standard. People (avg office-worker people) are sick of Word's Feature-itis anyway, and wouldn't it be compelling for a company to get to stop paying for Office entirely -- and just use, oh, AbiWord? Fast, efficient, does what you want it to, compatible with the Word everyone uses (95, 97), and free.
Not to mention: I really have doubts about companies wanting to store their documents on Microsoft servers across the internet, which is what MS is apparently planning.
Side note: never thought about this before, but just imagine: with the DMCA, reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS would be illegal, wouldn't it? No PC clones! I have to admit, sometimes I'm only inches from becoming a Libertarian.
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I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
All of them already have some form of import/export. The problem is: they all suck.
But imagine the threat to Microsoft if any of them -- muchless all of them -- could import and export MS Word documents perfectly.
What a world it could be, Microsoft-free.
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I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Yeah, imagine what a horrible world it would be if everyone used the same format and we could interchange documents without any problems.
Uh, only if we're all using the same very latest version of Word on the same very latest version of Windows, on the same Microsoft-approved Intel-supplied hardware -- and then we get to play a big game of Simon Says -- "Microsoft says: okay everybody, time to upgrade, please enter your credit card number here."
I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that Microsoft has just as much right as anyone else to set standards.
The problem is that their "standards" follow the form of "here's our magic new standard format, it'll sorta do most of what you need, but only if you use it with our software. Don't bother trying to figure out the details of the format, because we'll change it at our whim, every so often, just to make sure that no one else's software will work with it. Even older versions of our own software won't work the the latest format, so everyone in your company will have to upgrade."
Microsoft doesn't have standards, they have proprietary formats. They don't want to promote and use open standards, they want to own the "standards". If they were willing/able to play well with others, they wouldn't be as hated as they are today.
Or did I miss something ?
I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that Microsoft has just as much right as anyone else to set standards.
Of course they have a right to propose standards for everyone to use. The trouble is, what they call a "standard" is usually a moving target.
Yeah, imagine what a horrible world it would be if everyone used the same format and we could interchange documents without any problems.
Hey, if this were the case, I would be happy. My point is that you can't even interchange documents among different versons of Office.
Plus, as speaking as somebody that has actually had to work on the DOC files, I'd much rather a common standard be due to some merit other than monopoly bullying.
If the unified document format needs to be extendend, the desktop environment groups can get together and agree on something so the file format will remain consistent. Good luck getting that from Microsoft.
http://www.talknerdy.org
While it's great to see collaboration done for importing and exporting Word documents, if they really want interoperability, they should agree on a unified document format. That is, when the different word processors from the different desktop environments save, they should save to the same file format.
The reason while Word's DOC format is so important is because it's the de-facto standard in the Windows world. I'm hoping we're not looking to make it the standard *nix world, too.
So, it just makes sense that all the developers get together and agree on a standard format so whether or not my coworkers and I are using Gnome or KDE or whatever, we don't have to go through yet ANOTHER set of filters.
http://www.talknerdy.org
Wordperfect 2000 is it's own can of worms, and frankly isn't worth the price. WINE is far to finicky to work reliably on that large of an application. Many things flat out won't work for me. Trying to open up a power point file in the presentation app caused a crash every single time. So did exporting to pdf. On top of thise I've only seen a patch for fixing the install and uninstall problems present on some distributions, nothing else.
What about reverse engineering catdoc or Word2X? I've been able able to open Word files without a problem with them, and when I need to save I download the files to my laptop as text to save them under Mickeysoft, otherwise I try to save them with StarOffice (which borks things out every here and there).
The program could use existing code with a tcl or Python shell to get it done, maybe someone should contact the authors of the programs (Word2X, Catdoc) and come up with a collaboration.
Want Root?
Except that XML does seem to be an actual up-and-coming standard.
Ok this is probably way off topic, well it is, but I'll put some of my strong points on my arguements over XML, which are strongly opinionated (as is everyone's). One of the biggest problems I've seen with XML is that, many have already created massive content on existing languages, whether its XML, Python, Perl, HTML, and many have invested a large amount of money into the already existing languages.
In order for a company to feasibly make the move over from $INSERT_LANGUAGE_HERE over to XML would mean that their programmers would have to know it meaning it would cost them more to pay for their education in it (even though they could learn online please here this out) or hire someone familiar with XML.
Looking at the current scenario, many companies have done well without it, not to say it shouldn't be used, but just to give everyone a reminder on it. It's always going to be an extremely opinionated arguement, and points/counterpoints could run on for years. Same arguements go for JAVA and others, you don't neccessarily need them for one, and just because someone uses X or X becomes a pseudo standard should not mean that programmers should focus on X and forget the core basics of it all.
UML, XML, HTML, CSS, COOL, JAVA, it all boils down to needs, and XML is not really a neccessity, and soon there'll be another acronym toting the same claims as the existing ones, "The Next Best (overhyped) Thing"
Sorry if I sound like a troll I'm trying to be as sincere as possible about my thoughts on it, without sounding anti-anything (XML, or other) just my notes on it. I think the programmers should stick with the basics without getting all fancy.
Want Root?
Your assuming things will move over to XML, and everyone is going to use it. Let us not forget about the standings when it comes to creating a so called standard, shtml, WML, and all those other acronyms I care not to type.
Want Root?
WAV is a rip-off of the IFF format started on the Amiga (only difference is that IFF words are in big-endian order, RIFF a.k.a. WAV words are in little-endian order).
Microsoft didn't come up with XML, they just adopted it.
Normally, I don't respond to ACs, but this was just too much.
Now, go back to smoking your astroturf.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Yep, damn shame. Ever opened any HP-UX manual? Like the looks? Okay, that's done in TeX.
It would be a much better world if all wordporcessors supported:
TeX
html
rich text format(but not the bastardized, newer MS implementations of it)
and, of course: SGML
Sigged!
tex exporting is already supported in a few koffice apps, including KWord. they beat you to it =)
LaTeX has nothing to do with XML. LaTeX is a document preparing system based on the typesetting engine TeX which was developed in the 80s by Donald Knuth (who else). XML is a much more recent innovation.
Most commonly used to parse (unambiguous computer) languages, but a word file is alot less complicated then a language I can assure you :)
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Which shows that there is a silver lining in black clouds, afterall.
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FB
As another WP user from way back (WP 3.5 for the Mac is still my favorite werp of all time, with 6.0b for DOS running a close second) I say, "Hell, yeah."
... maybe what the world really needs, in addition to open source suite projects, is an open source file translation project, with the goal of being able to convert all the common (and some not so common) formats to and from XML? An OpenDataViz kinda thing ... Something like this that really worked, and was genuinely open and cross-platform, with people contributing new modules to it for ever more obscure file formats (need to put your dBase files into a ClarisWorks spreadsheet? We can do that) would solve a lot of problems.
Combining this with the above thread on XML
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you like micro-controls, try WordPerfect and open up the review code screen. Not close to TeX of course.. but you can fine-tune things you can't do in Word. And just like TeX, WordPerfect is great for producing long and huge documents. One tends to mess things up in Word (especially itemization).
Don't think WordPerfect is based on a customized version of TeX. But I like to know the answer too, if someone knows it. The reveal code screen sure looks like TeX commands in some ways (eg, [BOLD]this is bold[Bold] vs { \bold this is bold}. Or rather, WordPerfect is closer to TeX and HTML, and its variants and descendants, than other word processors.
Exporting to TeX is straightforward. Importing TeX is very tough, because TeX is a programming language, not a representation. It's hard to do anything with TeX except run it, which renders output. This loses the document structure. The same is true of PostScript.
In the old days (windows days) every application semmed to be ablt to "talk to" and "incorperate with" each other.
Later I found the true way. There came Linux and after a painful 6 months I was able to do most of my job on the command line. The applications were still coorperating with each other. Oh, yes there was X, too with ugly but "coorperating" motif applications.
Then the dark side of the code emerged. We were all bound with project who do not like each other and all duplicating efforts. (see: KDE, GNOME and 80 million media players). I was unable to undestand all the *.desktop and *.nautilus horrors.
At last the sun starts to shine again. People start to realize that choices are good (vi/emacs/rhide) but code duplication (KDE/GNOME) and uncoorperation is not (*.desktop, *.nautilus).
I only wonder when the Moz/Konqi was will be over.
The OpenDWG effort is laudable, but last I checked, the public won't get source to the library. Apart from the library not being available for the platform I use, it's not very sustainable: what if they fold? What if you upgrade and the libraries are no longer compatible with your new OS?
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
XML is better to use than SGML. SGML is very hard to deal with and parse. XML is more strict, and less likely to have interoperability problems.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The announcement linked didn't mention XML but I agree with you--this seems like the right thing to do. For almost anything that MS Word formats you could duplicate it exactly using html+css1, and I think this should be a priority. The thing is, this would make an excellent independent project; you don't need the gurus of free office suites to muck around with this. You don't even need to know anything about their particular software at all.
I wonder if the recent propaganda assault by Microsoft is drawing the open source/free software community closer? There have been a spate of these "new cooperation" stories lately. Perhaps differences in philosophy and direction start to seem pretty minor when Microsoft conspicuously brings its ion cannons to bear...
Only reason I picked XML is that it seems to be the best choice for an intermediate language anyway.
:-)
What is needed, though, is documentation on the current MSOffice formats. (Reverse engineering for interoperability...) Probably using OpenOffice's formats would be better, but ymmv.
And you're right about not needing to be involved in the projects; all you need is a way of forcing them to use your intermediate language at gunpoint
/Brian
And monkeys *might* fly out of my butt...
.doc file standard on the shelf next to Adobe's PDF definition. This is like Samba -- Andrew Tridgell wrote the original using a packet-sniffer on a DEC Pathworks server, as I recall. That's reverse-engineering for you.
If Microsoft had any interest at all in interoperability there'd be a
/brian
And what -- sit by and never be able to handle Word documents? Unfortunately, there are still a good number of people who want to see, for example, resumes in Word format. (Even tech HR people sometimes insist on that, though I'm inclined to write them off as clueless...)
It's like being a Mac user or, I don't know, a non-American. Your average Mac can read a PC disk, but it doesn't usually go the other way. Meanwhile, your average USian speaks English and *maybe* Spanish, which means the rest of the world has to learn English to communicate with us. Good, bad, it's the reality -- it's great that Sun eats its own dogfood by using StarOffice internally, but file exchange is pretty important, and MSWord is the number one format to translate.
/brian
This actually makes a lot of sense, especially when file formats are starting to move to XML-based formats (see OpenOffice) -- just translate the Word format to XML (or whatever) as an intermediate format.
Come to think of it, this would make a great project; anyone know what would be needed to write msw2xml(1)? My perl skills are becoming a bit rusty...
/Brian
This needn't be true, though. Since you have the TeX source, you should be able to come up with an output method for TeX which will output to, say, an Abiword doc, and simply outputs the information for the document structure along with the text and so on, rather than generating, uh, whatever it generates. Is that PostScript? The same is true of Ghostscript and PostScript. I'm not saying it'd be trivial, or that I could do it, but it's certainly possible.
Also; Why do libraries? Unix gives us STDIN and STDOUT for a reason. Just make any filter an executable. If you're filtering a document, and not a stream, you don't lose anything by that methodology, and the added beneficial side effect is that you end up with executables which anyone can use in any project, from a shell script to C++ to Java...
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Amen. One of the biggest issues I run into in tech support at my company is outside legal offices using ancient (or even not-so-ancient) versions of WordPerfect.
Since my company is standardized on Word, we actually have a couple of secretaries whose sole duty is to convert WP to Word, and then correct all the mistakes from the conversion. WP can't import Word properly, and Word can't import WP worth the dead snail on my porch, so the whole company ends up pissed at both. (Rumor has it that we paid for one of our primary outside counsels to convert to Word because of the sheer volume of documentation involved.)
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The oldest versions aren't so bad, but once you hit the Windows versions and have things like tables and columns.... Ugh...
This issue is why I look forward to XML as a single standard for saving documents.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
There are several open source word processors available and they all need to import and export the ubiquitous MS Word format
What about WordPerfect's *.wpd format? Yes, I know -- WordPerfect is available for Linux, and for free. But a lightweight, open source word processor along the lines of AbiWord or kWord would be real nice if it supported wpd files.
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DOOR!!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I don't know what the fuss is about. I use KMail for e-mail, and it already has a filter for dealing with .DOC attachments. It's activated via the 'Delete' button...
For wp8 you need to install libc5 and ld.so. You can get them from a mandrake 7 cd. Or you can get the Caldera libc5 rpm, which contains also the lib from ld.so. Then it should install and run.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
MS created the MSWord format, so don't you think it might be more effective if they asked Microsoft for info on how they can make their documents MS Word compatible? It's a no brainer :)
I love AbiWord for reading MS Word documents and writing quick letters, etc. I think it's a great program, and it reads the Microsoft .doc format quite nicely. But one thing that all open source word processors have omitted, including Open Office, is WordPerfect document support! Sure, I can get WordPerfect for Linux, but isn't the point of Open Source that you shouldn't need to be tied to a single proprietary piece of software? Isn't that what the freedom is all about?
For one reason or another, I can't get WordPerfect 8, the personal edition available for download, to install on my Linux box. Perhaps it doesn't like Mandrake 8, maybe it's my own ineptitude (I've been running Linux as my primary OS for about 4 months now), but it just won't cooperate. I wouldn't mind purchasing WP Office 2000 for Linux, but if I can't get WP8 to install, that tells me that WP2000 might suffer from the same problems. Given the average return policy of most software stores (i.e., no returns once it's open), I'm extremely hesitant to spend upwards of $100 on software that may or may not work on my machine. But I've been using Word Perfect for over 12 years now, and need WP file support. Right now, the only way I can get it is by booting my Windows partition and using WP2k for Windows.
So developers, if you're listening, Word support is great, but don't forget about those of us who haven't used Microsoft (at least for word processing) for a long time!
- Stealth Dave
--
Evil is as eval("does");
- WordPerfect, because that's the word processor I like, and it prints well for hard copies.
- html, because it's everywhere, and even M$ Word lusers can read it.
When I email my resume to someone, I attach the html version, and if the want ad specified a Word format, then I politely explain to them that I can't provide it as aOh, and I know someone it going to protest by saying that WordPerfect can save to .doc or .rtf, but it really destroys the formatting, which to me is half the battle of getting potential employers to actually do more than glance at a resume. If they see something with the indenting trashed and different font sizes from one page to the next, all they are going to do is toss the resume in the round file.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Didn't know that, thanx for the info. Just checked it out and it looks quite ok (the exported file when ran through latex looks quite nice:). Never seriously looked at kword before, will do that now. Kudos to them!
Cool, I hope they'll also start supporting importing and exporting to TeX. Maybe then the stuff will start looking professional*. Kidding aside, it's a shame that the word-processing crowd is ignoring the best type-setting system around. WYSIWIG documents just don't cut it compared with a doc prepared in LaTeX.
* professional as in 'professional publisher', not as in 'professional marketeer'
There's compiler writing tools. There's GUI building tools. There's class frameworks out there for just about everything. Maybe we need file-format interpreting Meta-Tools and some codified domain specific knowledge for this problem.
This collaboration is a good start, if they concentrate on not only coming up with filters, but discovering HOW to come up with a good filter.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Just wondering why the OpenOffice people aren't stated as being involved in this.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Sure. If things keep going at this rate, Open Office could write a Word importer and exporter and finish it about the time MS is releasing the NEXT version of Office. Playing catch-up doesn't help set standards or even acquire market share.
I didn't know Word sucked at importing WP so much. Luckily I've didn't have to import anything from WP to Word on my Mac when I bought it because the only .WPD files I had were stuff from when I was like 5 years old messing around on the 286. When ever I have to use a .DOC file on my parent's PC I just open the copy of Word that Conpaq was so nice to install for us...
--Volrath50
What KWord and that need are filters for other formats, paticularily WordPerfect 6-10. The thing about WordPerfect is that once you get WP6's format working you can open WP7, WP8, WP9 and WP10 because Corel never changes the format, unlike MS.
Without this my Dad can't switch to KWord or anything else (doubt he would want to though, he like WP8 too much) because he is an Auto Teacher and he has about 10 years worth of tests and stuff in WP format dating back to WP 5.1 on a 286 and DOS 5.1. (I remember that 286. Orange and black monitor. Those were the good old days. :-) And I know WP runs on Linux but everyone that I know hates WP for Linux.
While it would be possible to convert them all to RTF or something, he has hundreds and hundreds of files it won't be easy or fast.
What RedHat and others can to focus on is telling the Average Consumer that Windows XP is violating their privacy, among other things. Every few days I tell my dad about Windows XP's evil features (Such as Hardware ID stuff) and he considers switching to Macs or Linux more and more. But again the biggest thing keeping him back is lack of ANY WordPerfect format compatibility. (Minus WP it's self). The biggest thing keeping me form switching from my Mac and Word is lack of good consistant GUI.
I should stop rambling on and sum my post up: WordPerfect compatibility is important too!
--Volrath50
A common format between open source Linux WPs would be a big bonus! And it would make writing a Word2LinuxWP filter much easier.
What is the difference between LaTeX and XML? Aren't both specialized subsets of SGML?
Does anyone have any links?
One thing I will give XML, you could specify your WP as conforming to a given DTD version then as people add more features to the DTD you can release a new version of the WP that has support for the DTD features. This would drive the market in a feature oriented way without breaking much. Plus if it's in XML you can verify the ducument is well formed even if you couldn't edit or display some advanced tag. Of course the ultimate is that your WP would be a big component manager and you could 'plugin' new document features when a new DTD is approved.
Final comment - Isn't WordPerfect based on customized version of TeX?
---- Smokin' another sig.
Aside from all of the usual "Microsoft is evil" banter, it is very true that such corporations are not at all concerned with interoperability and compatible formats. Seriously,what standard has Microsoft pushed? And by that I don't mean a de facto standard like "Win9X is installed by many OEMs so it the standard as far as 'X' is concerned". What contributions to specifications and standards organizations has Microsoft applied?
My guess is that like all dominanat entities, they will change when outward circumstances force them to do so (RE: economically feasable). They control > 90% of the desktop and office software so don't count on standards or cooperation. Notice, however, some time back that they were pushing Internet chat standards merely because they had not the marketshare AOL enjoys.
"what good does .doc format do for _anyone_? "
I agree, however over 90% of the market uses this format. Though not the best, it is the leader and we must recognize or fight that. We can't pretend it does not exist.
Im really happy to see this type of collaboration. It is only good for projects. I feel that Kword could benefit the most, as Abiword seems to do the .doc "thang" better for me. Glad to hear this is happening, and I hope to see more of this example.
they don't care to lose market share
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