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Much better - thanks. Any further responses will not be top posted.

Clients typically are set to view to screen width (yours does). However
as you can see, replying to such creates an issue; hence the issue of
what you see below. Unwrapped posts places the onus on person replying
to your posts to fix your 110 char format and rewrap to a common
72/80(max) character text format. I can do this in my client by Ctrl-R,
however I shouldn't have to. You can easily see the difference with your
current reply vs your other below.

So, let's go back to top posting; were you to receive /only/ this email,
would it make sense to you to read this first and then have to sort down
through the rest to understand what we are currently talking about? Try
it; print, set aside, and then start from the top.

I realise that you may have issue with your Outlook client, but even
with that it's not difficult to interleave/bottom post. Give it a try...
If it doesn't work out for you then fine, but then print a list post
that you last participated in, set aside for at least one day, read
later, and consider what you'd prefer afterwards.

And thanks for replying and trying, it's appreciated :-)


On 09/15/2011 07:02 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

Gary,

I see word-wrap just fine on the web page you linked to.  
It appears that the list provided automatic word wrap. It
won't reflow if I make the window narrower than where it
did auto-breaking, so I couldn't read it comfortably with
my phone's browser, unless the forced wrap is something
like 30 characters (with landscape viewing).  But the auto-
breaking is there, with a line width of around 110 
characters, it seems. 

I also see word-wrap just fine in the e-mail you sent to me.
So the answer is yes, I would see it all just fine.

The conflict is with clients that do know to word-wrap the text,
which is kept in paragraph-level streams so the client can do
correct word-wrap with whatever the displayed line size is.

I know some list archives *prevent* work-wrapping by using
<pre> instead of <p> elements when plaintext is presented
via HTML.  The GMANE page you linked to uses <pre> but then
does automatic word wrap to keep line width at around 110
characters.  Works fine on my monitor [;<).

When email is word-wrapped with hard line breaks, it is 
then ugly in situations when the client also does automatic 
word-wrapping.  And when there are ">" reply-nesting markers, 
it gets worse.

Catch-22.

So if I sent HTML-formatted mail, would that actually work
better for you?

 - Dennis

PS: This message manually word-wrapped for your pleasure.

PPS: There is an SMTP IETF RFC that explains how to auto-
matically handle word-wrapping and tell when not to word-
wrap a line.  It appears that knowledge of that is not
uniformly distributed.  I think the architectural principle
is that the recipient would know what its wrapping needs
are and the sender has no way to know what works, hence
no pre-wrapping inside paragraph text.

-----Original Message-----
From: NoOp [mailto:glgxg@sbcglobal.net] 
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2011 16:44
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: Rountrip Conversion Problems (was Re: Should LibreOffice ... 
secret formats?)

I'm going to top post on purpose this time (shock & awe)...

Dennis, sorry but I've a hard time following your posts. You top post
without any word wrap & here is how your post appears in my standard
email client.

I well appreciate your participation on this list, however you've
already read, and commented[1], on "Top Posting... Can we have an LO
Mailing List Guidelines Page?" thread. How does top posting and lack of
word wrap make the following readable at all?

Re: word wrap:
<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.documentfoundation.libreoffice.user/10816>
Is it that difficult?

Were you to initially receive the following in your email client
(X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 14.0) would you be able to follow and
understand just what the heck you are talking about?

I think your contributions to this list are sincere, well thought out,
and valuable. /Please/ reconsider your top posting and lack of word wrap
in future responses.

Gary

[1]
<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.documentfoundation.libreoffice.user/10798>

On 09/11/2011 06:31 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

It is tough to figure out what bug to report in the multi-column text-flow problem.

In the dashed line problem, it is easy to report two bugs, one for dashed lines to .doc and one 
for dashed lines from .doc.  

In this multi-column flow case, LibreOffice can round trip, and the bug is in the change to 
column and spacing widths that have the material not fit and not flow properly.

So there is a bug around not being able to consume what it produces properly.

THE SERIOUS INTEROP QUESTION

The other problem, that I don't know how to deal with, is whether that is a proper .doc for what 
is in the .odt at all.  I *think* the problem you are seeing is that the frame on one of the 
images in column 2 is actually too wide.  Or maybe column 1, and it forced the kind of 
adjustment you are seeing.  But the consequences in Word are particularly awful.

What is even more amazing is that what Word does with that specific .doc has not changed since 
Office 97!!  NoOp gets near-identical results from the .doc in Word 97 that I get from it in 
Word 2010.  I bet if the second page is examined, the column 2 content will be seen to have 
flown down to the second column there.  (The only difference that I see in Word 2010 compared 
with the Word 97 screen shot is that 2010 has a double title over the graph in column 3 and 
consequently more text flows to the top of column 4.  I hadn't noticed that additional title 
doubling in my earlier report.)

On the other hand, what Word 2010 does with the original ODT is strangely close to what it does 
with the .DOC, and that is *really* inexplicable.

So there's not enough here for an isolated bug.

MORE DETAIL: I forgot to check this before.  When the .doc is opened in Word 2010, the columns 
are set as four across, with column 1 1.6", 2-3 at 1.25" apiece, and column 4 at 1.6".  The 
spacing is 0.7".  The equal column width box is not checked.  The margins are 0.35" top, left, 
right, and bottom, with no gutter.  The page is US Letter.

If I check "equal column width" I get 1.43" columns all the way across and 0.7" spacing. The 
duplicated titles I mention disappear, but there are other duplications in the columns.

(sigh)

FURTHER ANALYSIS POSSIBILITIES

Although it introduces more variables that can't be controlled, I think there are three avenues 
of further exploration:

 1. Make a .doc that seems as correct as is possible.  See what LibreOffice does with that.  
Then make an .odt from that .doc from Office 2010 to see how that round-tripping works.  This 
might localize *something*.

 2. Do the same thing with .docx in both directions.  If experience is any guide, this will be 
worse, but because .docx is an XML format it might be possible to find more clues by inspecting 
the XML that travels in various directions.

 3. Make a Microsoft Word XML file too.  This is a rarely-used variation that *might* provide 
more clues.  There are filters for reading those into LibreOffice also, although I have no clue 
concerning their quality.  (This can be round-tripped out of LibreOffice too, I believe.)

There is a project, Apache Poi, that has Java tools for manipulating and converting Microsoft 
Office format documents.  That might help to examine the .doc files to see where the 
discrepancies arise.  That's a lot of work to invest for this particular file.  I think starting 
with variations of simple cases may work better.



-----Original Message-----
From: Spencer Graves [mailto:spencer.graves@prodsyse.com] 
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 17:29
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org
Cc: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Rountrip Conversion Problems (was Re: Should LibreOffice ... 
secret formats?)

Hi, Dennis:


       Thanks very much.  Should I do something to file bug reports on 
these items?


       Spencer


On 9/11/2011 5:08 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

I repeated test similar to those NoOp also performed to see how the variations that I made with 
the dashed-line slide image show up here.

CONCLUSION

The round trip from Document A to B back to C is definitely broken in Libre Office in the 
manner described by Spencer.

The opening of either Document A or Document B in Word 2010 produces a terrible result where 
the 4 columns are longer and flow at their bottoms onto a second page.

This is so bad I despair of doing any further isolation.

  - Dennis

ANALYSIS DETAILS

A. Document A - The ODT from Spencer. In LO 3.3.2 I see 4 columns, each 1.5" wide, with about 
0.5" between.  The Format | Columns dialog reports 1.42" with 0.70" spacing and AutoWidth is 
selected.

B. Document B - The Word 27-2000 format DOC from Document A via Libre Office, by Spencer

C. Document C - The ODT file that reflects what is seen when Document B is opened in Libre 
Office.

When I open Document A in Word 2010, I see the problem that NoOp reported, concerning a blank 
column showing up.  There is also an error message about "Drawn Objects and Text Boxes 1."  I 
also see that there is a second page having 4 more columns (the 4th column is empty).  It 
appears that the columns stretch vertically down onto the second page.  That is, there are only 
4 columns but each column is two pages long, and the top of the second column is all blank, so 
its content only appears on the second page.  There are also columns whose content image flows 
off the bottom of the page and is chopped off.

When I open Document B in Word 2010, What I see is almost the same as when opening Document A 
in Word, but the B view has a duplicate title over one of the figures of the Financial Industry 
Profits graph in column 2.

Document C in LibreOffice is now 2 pages because the column sizes are screwed up, leading to 4 
columns on the first page and a fifth column on the second page.

There's no point in making a Document X because I have no means to obtain a correct version in 
Word to try saving back.

-----Original Message-----
From: NoOp [mailto:glgxg@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 15:09
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: Should LibreOffice even support Microsoft secret formats?

On 09/11/2011 11:06 AM, Spencer Graves wrote:

Another example:


1.  Download
"http://www.cagreens.org/sclara/resources/flyers/noCreditCd-bookmark20110306.odt";.




2.  Open in LibreOffice 3.4.3.  Save as MS Word 97 *.doc format.


3.  Close, then reopen the *.doc version:  When I did this now under
  Windows 7, this changed the widths of the columns had changed and
with it the column breaks, etc.  I checked Format ->  Page ->  Columns:
*.odt showed from Autowidth with columns = 1.42, space = 0.70;  *.doc
had columns = 2.13, space = 0.70.  The numbers do not make sense to
me, but the visual change is clear.  I noticed this problem with an
earlier version of LibreOffice 3.4 and I think also with Open Office
3.3.

...

I tested as per the above, and indeed LO does save the .doc with
modified column widths. I tested by saveas in LO 3.3.3 and then opened
the .doc with:

LO 3.3.3 (linux)
LO 3.4.3 (linux)
OOo 3.2.1 (go-oo build - Ubuntu linux)
OOo 3.2.0 (Windows)
MSO Word97 (yes I have MSO97 on an VirtuaBox Win2K install)

The worst/more serious issue is that in MSO Word97 blank second column
is inserted/shown. This means that the document renders only 3 populated
columns rather than 4. Screenshot is here:

http://imageshack.us/f/841/screenshotwin2kprorunni.png/

So, you've a valid bug to report. Check to see if one hasn't already
been filed before filing yours. Start a new thread regarding the problem
when you've done that and I'll be glad to contribute/add to the bug
report with my tests/screenshots.












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