[ale] A Real Sad Loss for Open Source in the Atlanta Area

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 17:26 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> I opened a bugzilla at opensuse which in turn was referenced by a bug
> at freedesktop (product: libreoffice).
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31036
> 
> The bug is because the latest version of OOo can't import a graphic
> from a *.docx file.

I have yet to receive a docx that contains a real document in it.  I
have this one guy who seems to be really fond of pasting screenshots
into docx files and mailing them to me when I ask for a screenshot, but
all of those open successfully (once I get to the computer, anyway...)
for me, at least so far.

> I've seen all the statements about how compatible OOo is to Word, but
> I just don't see it yet when something this basic is missing.

I'm trying to imagine what format it must be in.  All the graphics
formats I can think of (JPEG, PNG, BMP, etc.) are all supported in OOo
to the best of my knowledge.

> I also happened to edit a affidavit today that I was preparing with
> oowriter.  It started with a case style (a semi-complex table used in
> legal docs to layout some text only info at the start of the doc.).  I
> made minimal edits to the normal text portion of the doc and then
> saved it.  When a coworker opened it in Word, the case style was
> destroyed and had to deleted and brought in from another word doc.

Now this, I find interesting, as it should round-trip just fine.  That
is, unless document rendering using printer metrics is something that is
turned on, but I at least thought they did away with that asinine
behavior several releases ago.  I know that it's a PITA to move
documents from old versions of Word to new, and even between versions of
Word that use the same format, because historically the bloody thing
would use printer metrics for formatting (and again, people don't
generally know how to format, they assume it's a typewriter and manually
do formatting that should be automatic).

> To date, my efforts to incorporate OOo into a corp. environment where
> others are using Word and saving docs in the proprietary Word
> format(s) are just not succeeding.
> 
> I'm basically confused by the claims of success I see here vs. my real
> world failures.

I'd love to see example documents that fail.  I'd actually rather love
to put together a collection of such documents and the versions of Word
that they have problems interoperating with so that such problems can be
more easily investigated.  But the problem is that I don't have a means
to do anything with it easily; I don't know if you've ever looked at the
source code for OpenOffice.org, but it's huge and not at all navigable.

I don't know, maybe there is some sort of utility to creating a system
where OpenOffice.org versions could be automatically tested to create
renderings of documents and a sort of crowdsourced Web application could
show the OOo rendering vs. a reference rendering and click a "OK" or
"NOT OK" button.

	--- Mike