MS Word compatability

users
#1

Good evening
I just noticed something trying to open a ".doc" file a translation
agency sent me.
It contains Japanese characters and some German words/short text portions.
Opening the file in Word 2013 (don't have any other version) shows these
characters neatly separated.
Opening the same file with Writer, the text portions of adjacent
Japanese/German overlap.
One character width to be precise.

Is there a trick to correct this behavior?

Maybe related:
I was working on a different file (.docx) received from an agency. I
opened the original Word file with Writer and
saved it each time in .docx format. When I delivered the file, however,
the agency called me back and said,
they cannot open the file. I tried that on my own computer: opening the
Writer saved .docx file with Word
and got an error message, saying the file is broken. Something about an
xml code.
Saving the file as .doc resolved the problem. (file size increased by 350%)
Is that related to the above problem?
If so, what should I do to prevent this kind of problem?
(it makes me very unpopular with the translation agencies ...)

Thank you
Thomas

#2

@Thomas, *

It is a filter issue with the OOXML .docx rendering of CJK and Latin fonts.
Probably worth opening a bug report against.

Not really an answer, especially if you must substantially alter the
document, however you can export from Office 2013 Writer to PDF.

And then Open the PDF of the document in LibreOffice Draw.

Should have different, and *hopefully improved*, rendering of the mixed CJK
and Latin texts--allowing you to work.

Let us know.

Stuart

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
Any chance you could ask the Translation Agency to install LibreOffice,
OpenOffice or some other free office suite that does conform to
internationally agreed standards?

If they are always trying to get documents to display properly between
different versions of MS Office then they are going to keep on running into
incompatibilities like this. Also as more and more people are now using
systems that do implement internationally agreed standards then it makes
sense for them to have one too in order to avoid all these sorts of
problems with other people. If they don't or can't install LibreOffice,
OpenOffice or one of the other suites that does comply with international
standards then everything they write now, or already have will be
unreadable in the not-very distant future.

Doc is usually able to be read by almost every system these days but DocX
is notoriously unreliable. However ODT and PDF are both MUCH more reliable
when sharing files with people. The ODT format is sufficiently well
documented and defined that documents using the format should be fairly
easy to read in the far off future.

MS Office 2013 can supposedly;
File - "Save As..." to "Open Document Format"
but apparently in order to try to retain market dominance MS have never
been any good at implementing ISO standards, even though everyone else
seems to find it fairly easy to do so.

Another advantage of LibreOffice and OpenOffice is that they can often read
proprietary formats from ages ago, even though those formats are
increasingly dropped by the profit-making companies who created them.

So hopefully the Translation Agency might be willing to install LibreOffice
alongside whichever version of MS Office they have.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

Just to add to this, if you do file a bug. the devs would definitely be interested in having a copy of the file in question. It would really help out in working out any issues with the import.

If you are not able to file a bug, let us know, and, if you can send us a copy of the file, someone here will file it for you.

Cheers,

Marc

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
It is still important for LibreOffice to improve compatibility with certain
secretive and constantly changing formats. Our devs do a fantastic job
with this but this is one area where even fairly normal point&click users
(such as me) can actually help them directly.

Marc's answer should have been mentioned before i went off on my little
rant. I do still think there is an opportunity there for the Translation
Agency to improve it's services in the way they doubtless want to do
anyway. However, posting a bug-report about how well/badly certain formats
are read in LibreOffice helps improve the program/suite in a practical way
for all of us :slight_smile:

Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

maybe we should make a word plugin that reads LO format files. :wink:

#7

Sun did that years ago for MS Office pre-2007 SP1. Since then MS Office
has been able to (somewhat perversely) open/edit/save ODF files.

#8

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
It is still important for LibreOffice to improve compatibility with
certain
secretive and constantly changing formats. Our devs do a fantastic job
with this but this is one area where even fairly normal point&click users
(such as me) can actually help them directly.

maybe we should make a word plugin that reads LO format files. :wink:

It is more or less OpenOffice 3 with no GUI:

#9

That is version 3.1 released around June 2009. The improved version 3.2
was released just before Oracle acquired Sun.

#10

I never did file a bug report and am not sure I am "up to it", but I will try to find my way through that rather confusing
computer jargon jungle.
Thomas

#11

Some may be interested in my almost 2 year old Feature Request for
Libreoffice to provide a very simple, 'Document Compatability Submission
Page/Service', to make it very easy for users to submit problem
documents like this:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71534