Re: abiword

[Daniel Freedman <freedman@ccmr.cornell.edu>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2001, Marcelo Chiapparini wrote:
> Hi Christopher
> thanks for your answer
> 
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 05:03:05PM -0500, Christopher Cyll wrote:
> > Hi Marcelo,
> > The Abiword in Unstable reads Word97 just fine (though complicated MS Word 
> > features will not show up).  What version of Debian are you running?
> 
> Potato!
>  
> > Stable is a bunch of revisions behind on Abiword, so if that's what you run, 
> > YMMV.  Does anyone who uses Abiword on Stable know how well importing works?
> 
> Sorry about my ignorance, but what does YMMV mean?

Marcelo,
It means "Your mileage may vary," implying a cautionary note
in making inductions from one person's experience.

Chris,
On the rare occasions I'm still forced to deal with .DOC, I've used
Abiword 0.7.7 (the one in potato) with success in importing MS Word
documents, but these have generally been quite simple.  From what I
know, MS Word Import is so hard mainly because .DOC it is not a very
explicitly defined format, nor does there exist any real reference
implementation (supposedly documents in MSDN from ~98 timeframe are
incomplete and quite buggy).  First of all, it is constantly evolving
through versions of Word, and much worse, it is supposedly very
dependent upon the overall environment of windows (font settings,
etc.).  This last point can be empirically verified as many of us
probably have had past experience with the same document appearing
quite differently on different Windows machines, even when using the
same version of Word.

Hope this helps and take care,

Daniel


> 
> Thanks!
> Marcelo
> -- 

-- 
Daniel A. Freedman
Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics
Department of Physics
Cornell University