Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Should LibreOffice even support Microsoft secret formats?

On 2011-09-11, Anthony Papillion wrote:
> From: tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk
>
> > MS don't implement their standard in the way that they wrote they
> > would.  Having set a standard anyone that follows that standard is
> > guaranteed to produce things that are a little wonky when opened in
> > MS Office.  LO devs work at getting LO's implementation as wonky as
> > MS's but the wonkiness is the unknown factor.
>
> Ok, I can accept that. But then, aren't we back to a 'secret format'?
> If I implement a standard to write out a file a certain way and do it
> in another way that isn't documented then I'm not following the
> standard and, thus, my filetype is secret. The only way it's *not*
> secret is if they file is written to the standard without any
> deviations.
>
> At first, I thought 'ok, so this means MS has published a standard
> that other vendors can write to and MS will has implemented that
> standard (in addition to their secret one) so that MSO can always
> properly read other vendor created MSO files". But that's not the
> case. There are times, it seems, when LibO files are improperly
> rendered in MSO.
>
> So, apparently, the 'standard' really doesn't mean anything because
> that's not really what Microsoft is doing.

Yes, that's the issue. I don't know about the binary formats, but I've
read that Microsoft does not actually *follow* OOXML. (This, if true,
means, ironically, that there is no program with complete, 100%, OOXML
support.) Maybe it was just a hoax, but I doubt it. After all, it's
Microsoft.

With Microsoft stardards, either someone steps forward and spends their
time working out how to convert between MS formats and ODF, which will
take a *lot* of time (and will not address the implementation
deviations), or people flag issues and devs will address compatibility
issue by issue.

So, people with compatiblity issues, please report these issues.

-- 
Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg

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