Subject: Re: Office converters
From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 10:23:00 CST
On Mon, 2001-11-05 at 11:02, Michael D. Pritchett wrote:
>
> On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Sean Young wrote:
>
> > All,
> >
> > Since the API is really simple, we could do the following:
> >
> > o Use the office importers in Abiword for Win32.
>
> This is not usually a good thing. Those that have Office already
> installed, generally don't need AbiWord. Still a plugin to allow usages
> of this items sounds like a good idea.
>
> >
> > o Write our own office importer so that people using Word can save and
> > load Abiword files. New .cnv files are automagically added; all that
> > needs to be done is a create a standalone dll with the rtf importer
> > and exporter, re-write the API and we're in business.
> >
>
> I like this one. We could easily distribute to people that already have
> office so they could use .abw files without us having to convert for them.
> I don't know how successful it will be to get office users to do that, but
> it is a nice thought.
It would be a *great* idea to have a .cnv file that turned AbiWord
documents into RTF for MSWord users, so that they could read and|or
write AbiWord documents. It would be *trivial* to do so, really:
1) We already do --to conversions from the command line
2) The RTF filters accept arbitrary input/output since we do cut&paste
via them
I'm all for this. If MSWord users can read AbiWord documents, we might
get better penetration into various marketspaces. I'd love to distribute
this on our website. Problem is that this would probably be a violation
of the GPL (GPL abiword code used in a plugin that was loaded by
closed-source MSFT code).
I *don't* however, like us using their .cnv files as AbiWord filters for
various reasons. Not to mention that this would also probably be a
violation of the GPL (GPL abiword code loading closed-source MSFT code).
Dom
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