word documents

[Joseph C. Lininger]

The reason it is so hard to read the document is that even though there is
in fact an ISO standard for the .doc format, Microsoft Word does not
correctly implement it. This means that any program that conforms to the
standard may not be able to read .doc files generated by word.

-- 
Joseph C. Lininger
jbahm at pcdesk.net

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003 ccrawford at acb.org wrote:

> If that is the case, then why is it so difficult to read afile?  Not
> sure.
>
> -- Charlie.
> On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Jude DaShiell wrote:
>
> > Actually, the msword format is one of the iso standards formats.  It's a
> > long time since I've had any dealings with Microsoft so I forgot the
> > number of the standard they sent me.On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Charles Crawford
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 11:22:05 -0500
> > > From: Charles Crawford <CCrawford at ACB.org>
> > > Reply-To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > > To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > > Subject: Re: word documents
> > >
> > > Hmmm.   I never thought about the proprietary issue with MS-Word.  I wonder
> > > if we should not be talking with Microsoft to get at least the formatting
> > > info available?  Oh yeah, didn't Gates give the
> > > chinese open source Windows?  Hmmm.
> > >
> > > -- charlie.
> > > At 02:41 AM 03/16/2003 -0500, you wrote:
> > > >There are Word document viewers for Linux console.  The one I use is
> > > >called wv.  Another is called antiword.  No doubt, there are more.
> > > >Because Word is a proprietary format, and the specification is not
> > > >available, the authors of programs such as wv have had to
> > > >reverse-engineer a bit.  Because of this, certain things in the Word
> > > >document may not decode as well as we'd like.  Nonetheless, I use wv
> > > >and get reasonable results when converting from Word to html.  The
> > > >resulting html source is quite bloated, but, it's there.
> > > >
> > > >For pdf conversion, there's pdftotext.  This is part of the xpdf
> > > >package, and may already be on your system.  Surprise, it was already
> > > >on my stock installation of RH 7.2.  the one thing I don't like about
> > > >pdftotext-s rendering, is that hyperlinks get lost.  To preserve the
> > > >navigability of pdf documents, I visit <access.adobe.com>, and submit
> > > >the url of a pdf document (assuming I've found it on the web) to the
> > > >form.  What comes back is a nice html rendering (links and all).
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >Hope this helps,
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >-Dave
> > > >
> > > >
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> >
>
>
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