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."

Comments

They should also merge with "antiword"

[Florian]

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.

I read this yesterday or two days ago.

[josepha48]

They were talking about setting up an email mailing list, where they could talk about problems. They said that they could not do a library, because they user C or C++ and different technologies. They did mention that they would run into the same problems, and that they would discuss them on the list.

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!

Re:I thought Open Office had already this ?

[sabat]

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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How about having a unified format?

[joeytsai]

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.

jumping the gun

[joq]

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.

Word .DOC filter and e-mail packages

[oingoboingo]

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...

How about TeX

[NoOneInParticular]

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'