After you've built 0.3.4, and when you've got a little time, grab a copy of
the following 135 kb document:
ftp://ftp.dnai.com/users/c/cityjava/opensrce.doc
This Word97 document contains a quick transcript of the last meeting of the
CityJava SIG in San Francisco, where a hardcore group of Open Source folks
had a pretty interesting panel discussion. (Thanks to John Brewer for the
reference.)
First, try reading that document in your favorite text editor. For example,
on Win32, it's barely legible in NotePad, and WordPad totally barfs on it.
Now try the following seven steps:
1. Load it into AbiWord.
2. Take a brief pause while you smile and gloat. :-)
3. Scroll about halfway down the first page, and put your cursor at the
beginning of the paragraph that starts "Rommel: Mei Lin Fung, can
we just thank you for..."
4. Hit Ctrl-Shift-Enter to select to the end of the document.
5. Hit the "Space before: 12 pt" button on the toolbar, in the group just
to the right of the alignment buttons.
6. Without changing the selection, now go up to the top ruler and locate
the two sliders on the left-hand side. (They're little beveled boxes until
we can get them redrawn.)
7. Drag the bottom one to the right a half an inch or so, then drag the top
one back to the left margin.
Voila! That's a very readable document, isn't it?
Sure, there are still tons of problems with the existing Word97 importer:
- it ignores all formatting directives,
- fancy char.s (curly quotes, long dashes, etc.) get rendered as slugs,
- it doesn't handle fastsaved documents,
- and numerous other sins.
Nevertheless, we've already got an amazingly useful tool, especially when
you consider how *utterly* brain-dead the current importer is. You've gotta
see it to believe it. Crack open src/wp/impexp/xp/ie_imp_MSWord_97.cpp and
take a peek.
Is there anyone on the list who feels they *can't* understand those few
hundred lines of code? :-)
Enjoy!
Paul
PS: Of course, an even nicer thing about Open Source projects is that folks
like Justin and Caolan are going to replace this importer with a *really*
cool one.