As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible...
As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible thing. The main problem is that the file format relies on the behaviour of the Word formatter to work in a particular way. If you wrote a word processor and decided for yourself how it should format, then there is virtually no way you can figure out from the contents of a doc or docx file exactly how it should be formatted (and conversely no way to take what you have rendered and write a doc or docx file that will render it the same way). The only way to do it would be to write a complete clone of the Word formatter, which is essentially impossible because if you look at the docx spec you will realize that even MS don't know how it works. Of course, this is a technical issue that compounds a political problem -- MS enjoy a monopoly on office products and those office products happen to be essentially impossible to clone because they are ancient, idiosyncratic, legacy monsters. The only way to fix the problem is to get people to stop using those legacy apps --- which is pretty much unlikely. Linux is more than ready for the desktop. It is unlikely ever to interoperate seemlessly with MS Office, though. Still, the office in which I work has switched completely to Chrome OS and Google apps. The school I worked in before that has switched to Open Office and actually forbids the use of MS Office (because of interoperability issues). Who knows...
Posted by mikekchar on Jul 31, 2015, 1:04 AM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.5,000 issues0 comments
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I mean that's the problem though.
I've always believed the opposite: get conditionals deep in your code so that the higher level control flow is regular.
The biggest problem with AI isn't being able to do things.
I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredi...
Of course not, those are clearly scams.
Claude makes more detailed plans that seem better if you just skim them, but when analyzed, has a lot of errors, usually.
Effectively everyone is building the same tools with zero quantitative benchmarks or evidence behind the why / ideas … this entire s...
> creating and operating a small company in Germany is a nightmare To be fair, I think the problem operating in Germany is its federated...
As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible...
As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible thing. The main problem is that the file format relies on the behaviour of the Word formatter to work in a particular way. If you wrote a word processor and decided for yourself how it should format, then there is virtually no way you can figure out from the contents of a doc or docx file exactly how it should be formatted (and conversely no way to take what you have rendered and write a doc or docx file that will render it the same way). The only way to do it would be to write a complete clone of the Word formatter, which is essentially impossible because if you look at the docx spec you will realize that even MS don't know how it works. Of course, this is a technical issue that compounds a political problem -- MS enjoy a monopoly on office products and those office products happen to be essentially impossible to clone because they are ancient, idiosyncratic, legacy monsters. The only way to fix the problem is to get people to stop using those legacy apps --- which is pretty much unlikely. Linux is more than ready for the desktop. It is unlikely ever to interoperate seemlessly with MS Office, though. Still, the office in which I work has switched completely to Chrome OS and Google apps. The school I worked in before that has switched to Open Office and actually forbids the use of MS Office (because of interoperability issues). Who knows...
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