OSNews

i cna't really access the website before i get RTFMd by the masses so I only have the article description to go by in the way of commen. It is a nice idea but will it really help in people migrating from MS WORD. If it is build on OOffice then it will rely on ITS word filters, and we all know that they are not suitable for reading all Microsoft Documents.

To help people move away from MS Office solutions a robust tool is needed to ensure, or give the user the confidence , that there will be minimal mangaliing of the documents formatting. There many situations where huge documents make it impractical for searching visually for formattiing errors.

If this tool where built on the windows side where most MS users are , and integrated nicely into MS Word ,where most MS will obviuosly be then I can see it
giving businesses an option to start migration ...this more or less applies to academic case and the usercase to a lesser degree. .....
now that i have reached this far , and the web page has finally loaded i realise that i have some what missed the mark with my commentary , :-( i guess i should reightfully say ,ignore the above

Another simpler option is called antiword. It basically dumps out a word doc as plain text, which is nice for piping around and whatever else. Not as robust as going to an XML solution or anything the tool in the article mentions, but hey it's portable, small, and has no dependencies.

http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

I'll have to try out the article's tool too, although it looks like once everything is setup, I could have just opened the word doc in OO.org and resaved as a different format...

If you have MS Office installed and you need to convert 'doc' file into a 'odt' file, then you'd have to have application that has to open 'odt' file. Then, each of the applications, Abiword, OO Writer and KWord can deal with both MS Office and Open standard formats, and that means you can simply do 'Save ass..' and save the 'doc' file into 'odt', HTML or plain text file (many more formats).

What is so spectaculous about this tool?

Could be why Office 2007 announced they are changing the file format, (snuck it in while everyone was blinded by the new tool bar), the old one is just too easily converted to a something usable.

Thumbs up to this one for an interesting implementation, and smart use of xslt. What would be really nice is if they could build the necessary OO libs in to a PHP extension - imagine seeing some of the millions of PHP frameworks/CMSs/Blogs/etc start using something like this.

Does it handle the Pages native format?

All these converters are useless while people keep doing stupid things:

Aunt Joan Q. Average want's to send a video clip to Joe Q. Sixpack. She opens "Word", copies and pastes the video, and clicks on "send via e-mail", which produces some MICROS~1 memory garbage stuff (non RFC conform).

Student Timmybob Dumb is writing a paper for his exam. He uses the bold, italics, and underline functions along with font faces and font size to structure his document. Of course, it does not contain a titlepage and a table of contents. But most of the text is in "Comic MS" because it looks funny. Imagine oh his joy if he would want to restructure his text! Wow, how big the files get, the contents must be good! Furthermore, he draws his formulas with "Paint" and needs a DVD to take his document to his professor.

Chief analyst Chester R. T. Fullbrain got the mentioned video clip from Aunt Joan. He includes the DOC file in a PPT presentation, but because he's clever, he's making a RAR archive out of it and then he embeds the RAR archive in an "Excel" file which he sends to his deskmate.

Don't tell me anything, I've seen it all. :-)

Most people use "Word" as a better typewriter, no matter if they're employed at the ministry of finance or if they're just doing homework for school. They don't know of (and don't care about) simple functionalities like document templates and paragraph formatting. And why? Because they have never heard about. They god a pirated copy of some older "Word" version ("Word '97" or "Word 2000") and are happy with it. (At least, that's a common fact in Germany.)

So you better use catdoc and typeset it properly with LaTeX. :-)

BTW, as it was mentioned before, working converters are a good way to help people migrating to open standard formats. It's not very interesting for home PCs because the documents created there do not need to exist for a longer time; but in corporate settings it might be the right approach. Because if you have migrated to a standard, you can go anywhere with your documents. That's what companies should be interested in, because the IT infrastructure as they know it will not be available for a longer time, so they should decide now where they want to be in the future - with their data.