[luau] Wordperfect office and 9.1

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

Alvin Murphy wrote:

> I am in the process of biting the bullet and converting [from 
> WordPerfect] to OpenOffice (use Word Wizard to batch convert your wp 
> files to .doc, then the Oo batch conversion utility to get to the .sxw 
> format).  Good luck.

Dr. Murphy-

This is a very good move.  WordPerfect code is very antiquated, and its 
spaghetti-type coding structure also makes it essentially impossible to 
make any improvement without re-writing the entire program.  Everytime 
Corel programmers tried to do something, they always broke some 
functionality.

A couple of my former WordPerfect buddies have started a project  to 
"work" WordPerfect into OpenOffice.org:

wp.openoffice.org

Currently, there are two major tasks: libwpd (to implement WordPerfect 
functionalities in OpenOffice.org) and wpd2sxw (wpd to sxw filter).  See 
the following most recent communication:

libwpd:

0.5.0 -> 0.6.0
- Tibetan extended character support (Ted Lemon)
- Border-less table cell support (William Lachance)
- Support for some odd types of tables (William)
- Top/bottom margin change support (William)
- Header/footer support (William)
- Built-in filetype detection (William)
- Handle corrupt token (0x00) correctly (William)
- Code refactoring and bugfixes (William)
- Fix bug with long documents and tables (William)

wpd2sxw:

0.4.0 -> 0.5.0
- page margin support (top and bottom) (William Lachance)
- table bugfixes/additions (William)
- header/footer support (William)
- massive refactoring of the XML output generation: simpler, more robust (William)


I will get back to this topic later.  But as it has always happened, 
once this project reaches certain milestones and receives some 
publicity, we will begin to see a snowballing effect.  The ability to 
combine WordPerfect with OOo is perhaps one of the best things that 
could happen to the Open Source movement.