From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Wed May 28 2003 - 02:51:38 EDT
Hi Andrew,
> I'm with Dom. If we fix all these bugs, we will also
> be able to handle arbitrarily corrupted documents.
> 
This is not about handling corrupted documents; this is about not 
trying to layout as text something that is not text. Even the text 
importer assumes that what is being loaded contains some kind of 
layout information and it interprets it, so when you load a binary 
into AW, you actually do not see what the file contains, you see what 
the text importer thought its interpretaion was. This gets 
particularly messy if the file gets loaded as anything else than 8-
bit latin1 text; remember, we shape it, replace ligatures, reorder 
the contents according to the Unicode bidi algorithm, etc.
The bottom line is that AW is not designed to view binary files and 
so it should not prettend it can; the fact that Word cannot tell text 
form binary is a bug in Word, not something we should rush to 
emulate.
Tomas
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