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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."
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
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
But why not also see if they can also inlist Open Office. We that is if they will play nice.
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!
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.
Or did I miss something ?
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
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?
XML is not an alternative to Perl or Java. Those are programming languages. XML is a markup meta-language - a set of very simple ground rules for defining markup languages. It is already very useful. I'm writing an app that receives messages from a custom Windows app. Although the Windows programmers and I hardly share anything in common (they don't know what fork means, for example) we were able to agree on an XML message format with no difficulty.
And in case you're wondering, none of us really understand DTD's or the finer points of XML. If XML did not exist I'd probably be asking for messages formatted like RFC822 headers (Key: Value) and we'd run into endless problems with newlines, CRLF etc.
For decades programmers have been making ad-hoc markup languages and writing cheesy parsers that work 98% of the time. XML, which has exactly five reserved entities, lets us save a lot of energy and use proven standardized parsers.
There is very little to know about XML and it's nowhere near as complex as a programming language. If you've made a web page, you've written something close to well-formed XML. The only difference being that in XML every element must be matched by a closing element or contain a trailing slash. So <P> would become <P/>
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.
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.
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
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...
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?
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.
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
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.