Creating Excel files on Linux

[Roman Suzi]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, John J. Lee wrote:

>On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Alex Martelli wrote:
>
>[...]
>> and, as it happens, this is indeed going on (you can write .RTF, which is
>> an open and documented format equivalent to .DOC from Word's viewpoint,
>[...]
>
>Is it really true that for every .doc there is an .rtf that will look /
>behave the same when you load it into Word?
>
>Useful thing to know, if true.

It is true that Word can't guarantee doc-documents to look alike on
different systems with the same Word version (or slightly different). And
you want from it handling RTFs consistently... No way. Word's own format
is so complicated (obfuscated) that it is very hard to write stable
program for parsing it. In my experience, every doc-parser crashes
(including Word itself).

Try converting RTF -> DOC -> RTF -> DOC ... Maybe you will get
a fixed point RTF ;-)

>John

Of course, I can speak only about versions I saw. Maybe
Pan European Windows is more stable, I donno.

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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