Matthew Saltzman wrote:
SNIP
Now you want to save the modified document in .doc or .txt format.
oowriter can't tell until it actually carries out the conversion if
anything you've done could not be preserved in the external format.
(Well, for txt format, it knows for sure that information will be lost,
but it can't know if you care.) You might also have created a document
from scratch in oowriter, and oowriter would never have had the
opportunity to analyse any version in an external format. Your creation
would be in OOo format with no possibility of knowing what formatting
information might be lost on conversion until the conversion is carried
out.
One way to proceed would be to export the document anyway and warn you
ex post that formatting information was lost during the conversion. But
that doesn't seem to be the convention. The convention seems to be to
warn you in advance if the conversion might fail and ask if that's what
you want. You could argue that an ex post warning would be better, but
you can't argue that oowriter can always know ex ante precisely when the
warning is needed.
Perhaps you are right. The only distinction between the crap
MS puts out and OO is that OO is open source crap. :-)
[take that as a very BIG smiley!]
Mike
Now if MS would only warn that it's closed format isn't that
transportable across versions of Word. One reason that business my wife
works for moved to OOo. To much time wasted re-formatting documents
between Mac and Windows Word. At least OOo works the same between
Linux, Mac and Windows with only minor differences.
And as my wife said today, OOo files are so much smaller than Word files.
--
Robin Laing
