After takin' a swig o' grog, Tim Smith belched out
this bit o' wisdom:
> In article <YdnRl.577$he4.524@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Chris Ahlstrom <ahlstromc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> No, I think that importing old WP docs should not be part of any standard --
>> WP is merely an old, dead (and hence stable and well-known) format that an
>> application can convert from WP format into its own internal format, to be
>> written out again, preferably in ODF.
>>
>> In other words, the application uses a plugin to grab the data, and convert
>> it as best as possible into ODF, then operates on the ODF using the ODF
>> standard.
>
> That's OK for most situations, but sometimes you need to be able to go
> back--to take that converted document, and print it or display it with
> the formatting that the original program (e.g., WordPerfect) would have
> used.
That makes sense.
> The way people will do that with ODF is that when they convert
> from WordPerfect to ODF, they will write additional information that
> says things like "this paragraph uses the so-and-so WP line wrap mode"
> for those parts of the document whose formatting cannot be expressed in
> ODF.
Well, I still that is the job of the plugin converter, and it should not
have to output a WP-related construct, but a series of ODF constructs that
have the same or similar effect.
> They'll do exactly the same thing in OOXML. The only difference is that
> in OOXML, the standard contains (or contained--as I said, they may have
> taken the list out) a list of names to use for the tags, so that if you
> write a plugin to convert WP to OOXML and I write a plugin to convert WP
> to OOXML, we can pick the same names.
To my way of thinking, the output would /not/ be a WP construct, but an ODF
or OOXML construct set that yields similar output.
Otherwise you end up polluting your format with special cases derived from
the products of other vendors.
--
The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of
the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarian tribe now stacking wood at
her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic
Handsomas roared, 'Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my
steel through your last meal!'
-- Winning sentence, 1984 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
|
|
