Some problems on the MS filters for OpenOffice are discussed at
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3857/1/
Excerpt:
"In order to get the answers on why users were experiencing problems with
Word filters in OpenOffice Writer, I decided to go to the source itself and
dropped a line to Juergen Pingel, who is the project owner for the word
processor project in OpenOffice. He kindly referred me to Dublin-resident
Caolán McNamara who is the filters developer for Writer.
McNamara answered my questions about what exactly was going on with these
issues and even pointed me to a pretty good document explaining how the
overall filtering process works. He did this in favor of giving me a
description of the process himself, which he characterized as" a set of
incredibly complex mind-numbing processes to find text, graphics, and
attributes in a Word document to map them to our own document features."
Still, if you have an interest in this sort of thing, I recommend you go
peruse that filtering document. It's a good read.
When I asked McNamara about loss of formatting in Word documents, he was
understandably hesitant to speak directly to the problem, since he had not
seen the documents I was referring to. But, he did point to one of three
main possibilities. First off, he conceded that formatting loss could be
caused by a bug in the filtering process since the sheer complexity of
mapping document features from one format to another could lead to the
occasional error.
Secondly, he stated that formatting loss or changes would occur in a
situation what Word had a document feature that OpenOffice did not yet
support. If there is nothing to map a feature to, then, the next best
alternative will be displayed.
Finally, the formatting changes could be a conscious decision on the part
of the OpenOffice team. "Sometimes a Word layout misfeature... is so alien
to common sense that it just isn't supported," he explained. "
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