From: Hal Vaughan (hal@thresholddigital.com)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 22:53:46 EDT
I have a HUGE archive of Word Perfect files and since I've changed to OSS, I
naturally want to not just convert them, but make them as accessible as I
can. I've lost data before due to bad conversions or when I thought one
format was easily converted and prematurely gave up access to the older
program that could handle an older format.
I've noticed that AbiWord does the BEST conversions of WP files I've seen (My
files are in WP 7/8/9 format -- that's how WP shows it in lists). I've
noticed a side effect of the conversions, though. My files are primarily
video scripts, which means the margin can change MANY times in one page.
While Abi has no trouble with the margin changes, when I convert a WP file to
Abi, if I have to export it, there is trouble. I took several script files
and went through the process of converting them to AbiWord, then to other
formats (mostly RTF, M$ Word, and Star Office 6.0). I noticed that when I
exported these files, every margin change resulted in a new page. A script
that was 130 pages was suddenly over 2100 pages!
I borrowed a friend's laptop with Word 2000 on it and took parts of some
scripts and converted them from WP to Word, then converted them to AbiWord.
There was no problem with the margin-change = new-page problem. I looked at
the actual file in a text editor to compare them.
What I found that seems to make the difference is that the import from Word
seems to only use <section></section> tags at pages or similar major changes.
The WP import seems to use <section> tags every time there is a margin
change. It seems to me it is these <section> tags that are causing not only
a margin change, but also a new page when AbiWord files are imported into
other word processors.
I've noticed the props can be set in a <p> tag as well as in a section tag.
I've got 2 thoughts on this: 1) If I write a perl script that will go through
the file and take the props set in the <section> tags and set them in <p>
tags instead, then remove all the <section> tags, will that cause any
problems? 2) Is there any (simple) way to take care of this in AbiWord? I
would think it would simply be a matter of not using <section> tags unless
necessary and setting all the props in <p> tags. Is that as simple as it
sounds? (I'm not a professional programmer, so I realize what sounds easy to
me may be a nightmare in C or C++).
Thanks for any comments.
Hal
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Aug 22 2002 - 22:57:30 EDT