Re: oowriter problems

Hello,
At 19.10.2007 15:24, Tyler Smith wrote:
>I used the latest l2r from svn to convert a paper I'm working on. It
>looks great - the figures now appear much more sensibly, the tables
>look better, most of the inline special symbols are fine. Much
>improvement over the previous stable release. I checked this with
>oowriter, and it displays all my gammas and sqrt sybmbols, very nice.
>
>So then I add a single 'X' to the file and resave it, still in rtf.
>I follow this with a call to diff on the original file and the
>modified version, with the single additional character added. I get
>pages and pages and pages of differences! What's more, when I reopen
>the file all the gammas are gone, and random other bits get garbled.
>
>This has caused no end of grief as I painstakingly correct the
>latex2rtf output in oowriter, send it to my supervisor who opens the
>document in Word, and then complains to me that it looks like crap.
>
>What gives? Why does oowriter need to break files that it can read
>just fine?

I just confirmed with OO2.3 what I had tested with an earlier version:
Without any reference to latex2rtf, I created a document with 
OOwriter, containing a Unicode gamma in Arial (by "insert symbol"), a 
gamma in Symbol (type a "g" and choose font "Symbol"), and an OO equation.
Saving as odt and reopening works well (of course).
Saving as rtf, the gammas both are retained but the equation is gone. 
OO can not retain its own equations on opening in rtf, so there is no 
way to insert rtf code which would be interpreted by OOwriter as an equation.
But if you save as MS Word 97-2000-XP and have the "convert OO 
equations to MathType" checked, the equations are converted to 
editable EquationEditor objects. Although they look broken when first 
opened in Word, a double-click on each of the equations (in Word) 
makes it look fine.

Even worse, OO cannot interpret Word field functions (like the EQ 
fields inserted by latex2rtf) nor save them, this applies to both the 
doc and the rtf format.

If you open latex2rtf's output in word, double-click each EQ field to 
make it an EquationEditor object, and save the document as Word doc 
(not rtf), OOwriter converts the equations correctly (with the 
limitation that EquationEditor changes greek symbols into standard 
font whereas MathType handles them correctly; this is EE's fault, not OO's).

>Is this something we could fix at the l2r side?

As the rtf import to OO is limited if not broken, there is not much 
we can do about.
I would recommend that for converting to OO to use TeX4ht with the 
oolatex script. This creates a native OO file (which is a set of xml 
files and bitmaps packed in a zip archive) retaining all equations as 
editable OO objects. From OO this can be saved as Word doc, with the 
limitation that equations first look broken when opened in Word and 
need to be double-clicked to fix them.

Wilfried

-- 
Dipl.-Ing.(=M.Eng.) Wilfried Hennings c./o.
Research Center Juelich
INB-MUT
52425 Juelich
Germany
Tel. (+49) 2461 61 5570 ; Fax (+49) 2461 61 8254
email: [email protected]
PGP key available from key servers, e.g. from
     http://pgpkeys.pca.dfn.de/
work homepage: http://www.fz-juelich.de/mut/mut_home
All opinions mentioned are strictly my own, not my employer's



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