On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 05:27:32PM -0700, Jim McCloskey wrote:
|
| Hello. Like others here, I suspect, I've developed over the years a
| little toolbox of stratagems for dealing with the Word documents that
| people insist on sending me.
|
| It seems to me, though, that it's proving steadily more difficult to
| deal with this problem.
| Is this a solitary delusion of mine, or have others experienced
| something like this? Has anyone found a better way of dealing with
| this plague?
This is not a delusion of yours. Here's my finding :
Word :
antiword is mostly decent but
text-only (no fancy formatting)
tables and other fancy formatting can come out royally
hosed (and sometimes incomprehensible, but other
times not)
abiword , kword
one of these three usually works enough to get by
PDF :
gnome-gv looks nicest, but chokes on lots of PDF constructs
xpdf seems to work most (all?) of the time
acroread usually can handle stuff, but I found a certain
document that caused acroread to segfault (acroread on
windows worked, though)
| In addition, Ted and Abiword both seem to choke more often than they
| used to on the RTF files that I am sent.
I've heard that RTF is an open standard created by MS, but in the time
since the open standard was published, MS secretively changed the
format and now it really sucks. Actually, I've always had problems
with RTF in Abiword (eg try creating a nice-looking resume because the
co-op deparment says it must be in RTF format). Although that was
about 2 years ago, and I've avoided RTF since then.
HTH,
-D
--
A violent man entices his neighbor
and leads him down a path that is not good.
Proverbs 16:29
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