It's about time...

Posted Aug 4, 2005 5:09 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: It's about time... by hp
Parent article: Our bloat problem

Unfortunately, we lack lightweight apps that can deal with Microsoft file formats.

It's about time...

Posted Aug 4, 2005 5:53 UTC (Thu) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link]

Not sure you could have them - the MS file formats require all the MS application features. The hard part of implementing the formats is coding the features that use the stuff in the file.

anti-bloating microsoft docs

Posted Aug 12, 2005 15:55 UTC (Fri) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528) [Link]

my friend was writing her Ph.D. dissertation in microsoft word. now that she has to get it formatted to pass the university, I'm helping her convert it to LaTeX (we found a LaTeX class for her university to handle the formatting). the first step was to filter the .doc through antiword, producing a nice ascii file. even the tables came out nice. her 400 page .doc file was converted to ascii so fast that I wasn't sure it worked at first!

It's about time...

Posted Aug 12, 2005 23:28 UTC (Fri) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

Well, unlike OpenOffice Abiword and Gnumeric feel very light. Opening an Excel file in Gnumeric has _never_ failed for me (in my personal experience, 100% compatible - maybe I haven't used difficult documents enough), and on my 800mhz machine startup is nearly instant. Abiword is a bit less compatible with Word than I'd like it to be, but it's definitely usable, produces very nice output in XHTML, is kept simple - nice!

(BTW Inkscape/GIMP start up in a fraction of the time needed for their commercial counterparts - which might have a bit more features, but I seriously doubt a lot of people use them)

Just to mention that it's not all bad.