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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Software Utilities (Apple) Apple

Panther's TextEdit to Open MS Word Files 158

Posted by pudge from the now-ms-can-freely-dump-office dept.
2muchcoffeeman writes "Further signs that Jobs and Gates probably won't be vacationing together anytime soon: New Damage has what looks to be screenshot proof of Panther's TextEdit.app opening a Microsoft Word .DOC file. Panther beta users who have tried this report at MacSlash that it works, to a point. So what's next? Is Apple now going to bring back the late, great MacWrite Pro?"
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Panther's TextEdit to Open MS Word Files More

Panther's TextEdit to Open MS Word Files

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  • sweet. I use text edit to do all my programming and school work already, now I can open word files too? SWEEAHT

  • PDF (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TomGroves ( 622890 )
    Why did they use a PDF to display a screenshot, I wonder. Any ideas?

    • Re:PDF (Score:3, Informative)

      by danrees ( 557289 ) *
      Because when you use shift-cmd-3 (full-screen) or shift-cmd-4 (area) to take a screengrab, Mac OS X uses PDF for its output.

      • Re:PDF (Score:2, Informative)

        by TomGroves ( 622890 )
        Interesting. I guess opening a PDF seems more 'heavy weight' than opening a PNG. Learn something new everyday....

        If anyone is interested, a PNG file of the image in the PDF is 2KB larger than the PDF itself.

        • Re:PDF (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Tumbleweed ( 3706 )
          > If anyone is interested, a PNG file of the image in the PDF is 2KB larger than the PDF itself.

          Okay, so compress that PNG via pngcrush and then compare the filesizes. The PNG implementation of just about anything that creates PNG is usually pretty badly done. Considering the age of the PNG format, this is rather puzzling to me.

        • Re:PDF (Score:3, Interesting)

          by kilgore_47 ( 262118 )
          PDF is a native graphics format for MacOS X.
          open /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/QuartzD isplay.bundle/Resources/BootPanel.pdf
          Look familiar? (on preview: drop the space in "QuartzD isplay" that slashcode put there)

    • Re:PDF (Score:5, Informative)

      by djward ( 251728 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:22PM (#6464180)
      PDF is the default screen capture format in Mac OS X (10.2), and I assume in Panther as well.

      • Re:PDF (Score:2)

        by pmz ( 462998 )
        PDF is the default screen capture format in Mac OS X (10.2), and I assume in Panther as well.

        I'm ignorant, so I can't tell if this is funny or true. Regardless, wouldn't EPS (encapsulated PostScript) be a better capture format than PDF.

        EPS can go straight into LaTeX and Framemaker, for example.

        • Re:PDF (Score:3, Informative)

          by tyrione ( 134248 )
          The Quartz Extreme Rendering Engine original Display Postscript for Openstep now takes advantage of Postscript Primitives in PDF, plus direct hardware rendering to the GPU via other custom APIs to produce an advanced UI that renders line by line in real-time, smoothly with anti-aliasing built-in, plus never a loss of window viewing when one is moving them around the desktop.

          I had no idead EPS could manage and update Postscript coordinate points from Global to Local, on the fly?

          • Re:PDF (Score:2)

            by pmz ( 462998 )
            I had no idead EPS could manage and update Postscript coordinate points from Global to Local, on the fly?

            Er, uh...all I know is that I could take the EPS files outputted from gnuplot and import them into Framemaker documents. It worked really well for complex charts, where trying to juggle GIF image resolutions would have been a disaster.

            Also, this was years ago, so I could be mistaken.
        • No, it's true. Apples screen rendering is "Quartz" which is their own creation but is essentially "display PDF". They developed it to avoid paying Adobe to use Display PostScript as NeXT had been doing. Obviously since everything on the screen is already essentially a PDF it makes sense to just write it to the disk to "capture" it.
          • No, Apple was forced to create Quartz (nee ``Display PDF'') when Adobe pulled out the rug from under them and renegged on their promise to provide (first) a free license for Display PostScript, then a low-cost one---this was what nuked Apple's ``Yellow Box'' strategy to have a free (then inexpensive) run-time for what are now called ``Cocoa'' programs. Adobe has a history of yanking the chains of DPS licensees---look how the license changed for DPS between NeXTstep 1 or 2 and v3---at v3, suddenly it was res

            • Jesus Christ, How Hard Is This To Get Straight (Score:2, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Quartz is not "Display PDF". Don't know where you saw or why you decided to make up that retarded name. Quartz uses the Generic PDF format as an engine to Quartz. This was chosen over Display Postscript for more reasons than simply licensing costs. Apple had considered using the full PDF format, but the costs were higher--generic PDF is free to implement. They (Apple) did not invent generic PDF, Adobe did.
              • Quartz is not "Display PDF". Don't know where you saw or why you decided to make up that retarded name.

                No nobody ever officially called it "Display PDF" BUT it uses the "PDF" format to "Display" stuff on the screen the same way Display PostScript uses the PostScript format to display stuff on the screen. So to someone familiar with Adobe's Display PostScript saying that Quartz is essentially "Display PDF" makes perfect sense and in two words conveys exactly what Quartz is.
              • Not hard at all if one has followed the history of all of this and read the .pdf specifications---they're available on-line, in the same places as I have referenced the PostScript and Type 1 font format docs on my web site.

                An AC said:
                >Quartz is not "Display PDF". Don't know where
                >you saw or why you decided to make up that
                >retarded name

                It's a fairly standard descriptive term among NeXT users.

                >Quartz uses the Generic PDF format as an engine
                >to Quartz.

                What is ``Generic PDF''? There's PDF ver
        • I don't know about framemaker but any graphic standard go go into LaTeX. The graphics model for TeX is very much classical Unix and very generic and extendable. Some of the extensions may assume

      • It's not funny.... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Roofus ( 15591 )
        ...because it's true.

    • Re:PDF (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kvorg ( 21076 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:38PM (#6464374)
      They used pdf because it is the easiest format on the MacOSX, of course. The Quartz layer is running DisplayPDF, a subset of PDF (analogous to the relationship of DisplayPS of the late NeXTStep, and regular PS): that is what gives the smooth and fast look of vector graphics and permits for blazing fast GL-accelerated PDF rendering. It also means PDF is a very basic part of the system (see Quartz reference [apple.com] and Quartz 2D library [apple.com] ("Quartz 2D gives you access to powerful features such as path-based drawing, advanced color management, anti-aliasing, Bézier curves, PDF generation and playback, and transparency"). So PDF is the default MacOS format, these days.

      A good slashdotter would peek in the file and notice this:

      Producer: Mac OS X 10.3 Quartz PDFContext

      It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?

      • It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?

        When I first heard of Apple using display pdf for the gui and high resolution icons in something named "the dock", I was hoping that they had implemented what SGI did with their OpenGL--vector graphics on the desktop. Now, that was (is still? been 10 years, kinda hazy) an amazing desktop. each window had

    • I recommend everybody to install this free PDF browser plugin [schubert-it.com]. Click a pdf and it's displayed in the browser window. It's faster than both Preview (10.2) and Acrobat. So fast, in fact, that I now regularly read PDFs in the browser :-)

  • Openoffice.org? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xyrw ( 609810 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:17PM (#6464102) Homepage
    Apple could surely use code from Openoffice.org to create an LGPL component that could do the conversion for them... couldn't they? It would be so much better than firing up Oo.O for a simple Word document.
    • I think that what they ought to do is create an open source package from OpenOffice code that will function in a similar way to MacLinkPlus.

    • Re:Openoffice.org? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by djupedal ( 584558 )
      As an aside, I no longer find myself 'just firing up' something or other.

      Apps like Oo.O are run at start, and left running. Along with Safari, Mail, iTunes, Reason, SlashDock, etc. etc.

      2gb of RAM seems to help. Why 'open & close'...'open & leave running', I say.

    • Re:Openoffice.org? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dbrutus ( 71639 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @05:35PM (#6466165) Homepage
      It would be inconvenient as they're actually trying to create a programmer's tool in cocoa so that you can write and read from .doc as if it were a simple text file. The TextEdit capability is just a sample app to show that their project code is working. They could start with Oo.O but they probably would need to completely rewrite it so why bother?

      • NSText (Score:5, Informative)

        by rohanl ( 152781 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @07:50PM (#6467049)
        When I read the parent, it occurred to me that this is much more than TextEdit being able to read Word files.

        TextEdit is a very simple program. Apple even supply the full source for it in the developer tools under /Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit

        All the real work is done by standard Cocoa classes NSTextView and NSTextStorage. If TextEdit understands Word files, it means that they have added the support to these standard classes. That means that *ALL* cocoa applications will inherit this functionality.
        • If TextEdit understands Word files, it means that they have added the support to these standard classes.

          Not necessarily. That would be very nice of them, but I think we're more likely to see some kind of file translation API before we see esoteric document formats being folded into NS classes.

          • Re:NSMicrosoftDoc (Score:2, Insightful)

            by rohanl ( 152781 )
            NSText already supports RTF

            - (BOOL)writeRTFDToFile:(NSString *)path atomically:(BOOL)flag;
            - (BOOL)readRTFDFromFile:(NSString *)path;

            It's not a lot more esoteric to add support for .doc files

            There's one way of finding out.

            Anyone with access to Panther want to run class-dump on TextEdit and see what's in it?

            • Re:NSMicrosoftDoc (Score:4, Informative)

              by robbieduncan ( 87240 ) on Saturday July 19, 2003 @09:53AM (#6478131) Homepage
              I went one better for you. I compiled and ran the version of TextEdit supplied as example code with XCode on Panther. It was able to open a .doc file. I can confirm that it is using NSTextView and NSTextStorage (not custom subclasses) to do this. So it looks like all Cocoa apps using text views will be able to provide basic .doc file handling for free. Very nice :)

      • Re:Openoffice.org? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by JohnFluxx ( 413620 )
        hmm, well you can start openoffice and have it running as a server.

        Then your java apps (or python or whatever) can just talk to it via java objects (or whatever).

        Makes it trivial to create word doc's.

        In a day I made a web page where you could type in a web url or upload a word document, and it would create and return a pdf.

  • Apple is stepping up (Score:4, Interesting)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:19PM (#6464134) Journal
    Apple has been getting bold. And I love it. I still wonder about it all though. Safari rocks. Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac. FinalCut Pro kicks ass. Now Adobe wants to stop making Premier for the Mac. Apple has Keynote to compete with PowerPoint. And PDF creation with OS X is damn simple.

    Apple is taking on all the big boys...something you just don't see these days. It's very exciting. And let's all be honest. Why do Mac users buy MS Office? Because it's good? Nope. So they can open up .doc files made on a PC. Go Apple!
    • I don't think MS got scared, I think that it just stopped to make sense for them to put IE on macs...

    • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Atzanteol ( 99067 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:55PM (#6464572) Homepage
      Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

      Seriously, this is what I've always hated about both companies. They *need* control over their platform. Apple has a draconian rule over their hardware, and is pushing for more of the same in software. Microsoft will simply crush opposition in software, but is pretty reasonable about hardware (drivers are another issue).

      • Again we see the difference between a healthy company where there are alternative platforms and an unhealthy monopoly. The disagreement with tactics is contextual--if Apple had 90%+ of the market they would get DOJ heat as well.

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        There's nothing wrong with microsoft developing software that competes with existing software. The problems have occurred when microsoft used OS hooks that only they knew about. There is no evidence that apple has done anything like that. In fact, the frameworks used in safari were released, and they are used in Omniweb (still my browser of choice, btw).

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

        I think you're missing something fairly obvious.

        The people who look at Apple's recent efforts and go "Yay!" and the people who look at Microsoft's and go "Boo!" are two completely different sets of people.

        Believe it or not, most of the world has no problem with Microsoft's business plan, or Apple's, or most anybody else's. We like getting well-integrated applications for our computers. Some of us

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @04:27PM (#6465595) Homepage
        Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

        Seriously, this is what I've always hated about both companies. They *need* control over their platform. Apple has a draconian rule over their hardware, and is pushing for more of the same in software. Microsoft will simply crush opposition in software, but is pretty reasonable about hardware (drivers are another issue).

        To each his own. I've never held it against Cuisinart that I can't use cheaper Hamilton-Beach parts in my food processor. I don't begrudge the fact that I can't buy a Hyundai Town Car. I don't hold it against Apple that I can't call up Bob's Discount Apple Parts and build my own OS X box.

        Apple makes a damn solid product, box to bits. Part of the reason they can do this is that they don't need to waste time and money trying to support several thousand incrementally different sound cards, network adapters, modems, video cards, mainboards, etc.

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rtm1 ( 560452 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @05:01PM (#6465839)
        Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

        I don't think so really. If MS announced that Office was going to support OpenOffice native formats and KOffice formats then would we be upset? Probably not.

        The difference is that Apple is supporting more standards and formats, while MS typically tries to force their own standards on you to the exclusion of all others. And when MS does implement other people's standards they typically throw in some proprietary 'feature' that fosters incompatibility.. That's what we scream bloody murder about.

      • Apple's versus MS's tactics (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Slur ( 61510 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @05:11PM (#6465939) Homepage Journal

        Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

        No, absolutely not. The things that have bugged me have been:

        • Leveraging their OS monopoly and closed data formats to create barriers to competition rather than making a better product. (Internet Explorer, DirectX, etc.)
        • Pretending to embrace standards then creating extensions that make their version incompatible and platform-locked. (Java being the prime example.)
        • Using FUD - misrepresenting competing methods and technologies - in order to make themselves appear better. (Most recently pretending that Safari uses hidden APIs.)
        • Creating silly political initiatives like the Freedom To Innovate Network (FIN), astroturfing, and occasional phone surveys to create the appearance of grass-roots support.

        All that Apple has done is to push standards, make excellent use of open standards and Open Source APIs, and apply a consistent and elegant design aesthetic to their OS and their applications. In short, they have excelled through integrity and hard work. If Apple has an unfair advantage, it is only that they have applied a greater effort than others seem to have the courage to do.

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by BitGeek ( 19506 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @07:50PM (#6467051) Homepage

        Thats kinda silly-- Apple does control their hardware-- nothing draconian about it.

        AS to their software, they are not trying to be the only software provider for their platform-- they spend millions every year building free development tools, and working to get the message out.

        They built safari and then released a killer webkit to allow any app builder to easily put a html renderer (or web browser) into thier app. This isn't draconian-- they recognize that there are a lot of apps that could use web or http access conveneintly for unexpected things, and so they provide support for it.

        Apple is really kicking ass in developmetn tools-- they aren't top of the line yet, but they have a lot more momentum than even open source ones like eclipse. They want everyone to develop for the mac platform.

        The only places where they are competing head to head with third party developers are ones where those developers are working to kill the mac platform.

        Premiere on the mac SUCKED and has sucked for years, driving many Mac users to windows. Office is designed to do the same thing.

        Thank god apple is finally going after those people who are working to undermine their platform and showing that the best of breed video editing (for instance) is once agian on the mac platform.... and with good reason given the great multimedia platofrm they've built with quicktime and their hardware.

        This isn't control-- its support for the platform!
      • I think that what we're trying to say the difference here is that Apple has been putting out products that are better and the other companies are realizing that they can't compete. Adobe and MS aren't withdrawing Premiere and IE because Apple is doing anything to suppress their ability to develop for the platform. Apple is just making better software, plain and simple. MS drives the competition away by bullying OEMs and closing standards. That's why we scream bloody murder.

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:3, Insightful)

        by carou ( 88501 )
        Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

        Not at all - Apple wins customers by making products which are better (or better value) than the competitor's offering.

        Yes, iMovie is (effectively) free, and perhaps that discourages the light users from buying high-end packages from third parties. But that's obviously not Adobe's core market, and when you want to move to a more advanced program you can freely choose between Final Cut or Premiere,

        • Yes, iMovie is (effectively) free, and perhaps that discourages the light users from buying high-end packages from third parties.

          I can't imagine Joe Consumer dropping several thousand on a pro-level video app just to edit his vacation movies, can you?

    • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PeeweeJD ( 623974 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @03:27PM (#6464955) Homepage
      Why do Mac users buy MS Office? Because it's good? Nope. So they can open up .doc files made on a PC.

      Actually it is good. It does not conform 100% to the apple OSX guidelines, but it is close enough for me. Its also fast and stable.

      It is also nice to be able to create documents and share them with those less fortunate (Windows people). There is no spreadsheet program that is near what Excel does.

      Openoffice.org is great and all that, but until they can get it to run outside of an X window system, it can't compete with MS Office on the mac.

      If Apple wants to kick MS square in the nuts, they need to put out some kind of competitive office suite that opens up, and saves MS office files. It would not surprise me if they did the same thing with OOo as they did with safari. Apple has been burning alot of bridges lately with MS and there is only one left that I can see hat matters any (MS Office)
      • It is also nice to be able to create documents and share them with those less fortunate (Windows people). There is no spreadsheet program that is near what Excel does.

        Indeed. Excel vX for Mac is superior in some ways to the Windows version. Where I work at present I do not have access to any serious database and statistical analysis software, so I'm stuck using Excel to manage a list. The Mac version makes it is easy to use Excel like Access, since it includes a feature called "list manager" which allow

      • OpenOffice on the Mac (Score:3, Informative)

        by Slur ( 61510 )
        Openoffice.org is great and all that, but until they can get it to run outside of an X window system, it can't compete with MS Office on the mac.

        Of course Panther has built-in X11, but we don't know yet whether it will be any prettier than the X11 beta. My fingers are crossed.

      • omg.. i didn't just read someone say "stable" and Office for X in the same sentence, did i?

        If i could keep powerpoint from crashing.... anytime!.. it would suck a lot less.. honestly, it could only suck more if it was PowerPoint for Mac version 4.2.

        Apple is 3/7ths of the way to Micro Soft independence.... mail, browser, presentation...

        word processing, spreadsheet, small database, and drawing (a la Visio) need to be done (though you could argue that FileMaker Pro is the database app.. they need a FileMak

        • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Maserati ( 8679 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @09:33PM (#6467604) Homepage Journal
          I'm not keeping numbers at work, but PowerpointX is right behind Quark 4.11 as my #1 source of trouble calls. Lately, I've just been opening them in Keynote (we only have one license for the moment) resaving them as .ppt's and sending them back. This usually cuts the file size down by a third and solves a lot of simple corruption issues. I switch an executive assistant to Keynote tomorrow.

          EntourageX is #3 on my list, and I'm looking forward to the improved mail.app in Panther, as it is right now, mail.app is completely unusable for someone bumping into EntourageX's 4GB database limitation. I want it faster, a lot faster before I start deploying it. We used AppleScript for the QuickMail Pro-> Entourage migration (a bigger upgrade than going to Mail.app will be), so that won't be a big hassle.

          G5s this Fall !
        • >> word processing, spreadsheet, small database, and drawing (a la Visio) need to be done (though you could argue that FileMaker Pro is the database app.. they need a FileMaker Lite version that reads/writes Access)

          AppleWorks has all these functions, which could be polished a bit or rewritten in Cocoa.
      • >> Actually it is good. It does not conform 100% to the apple OSX guidelines, but it is close enough for me. Its also fast and stable.

        MS Office is nothing but fast and stable. Word is probably the slowest app on Mac OS X ever, even with only a few pages of text.
      • Any time I receive an Excel spreadsheet I open it in RagTime [besoftware.com] which can equally export its spreadsheet components so they can be opened in Excel by clients.

        RagTime isn't only a spreadsheet, but its spreadsheet components allow me to do more than I could ever imagine trying to do in Excel. It is also a layout package and thus provides a one stop tool for data intensive publishing such as price lists and the sports results systems I cut my teeth on.

        RagTime was originally developed for the Mac only but the de

    • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @03:47PM (#6465163) Journal
      "Safari rocks. Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac."

      Safari was just an excuse. MSFT was planning on discontinuing IE for the mac for a long time now and Apple knew it. MSFT will use a backwards version of the tactic they used to oust netscape from the browser market. They will use their browser monopoly and IE features integrated into Longhorn OS to marginalise the OS market. You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users. That way they attack Apple and any other OS rivals simultaneously. Damn those MSFT busienss strategists are smart...

      Why? Because it makes sense.

      • Re:Apple is stepping up (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dbrutus ( 71639 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @05:47PM (#6466237) Homepage
        Web services nightmare

        July 4, 2006

        Dear Mr. Bank CEO,

        Apple customers + Linux customers are about 7% of the desktop market. The xxx Bank web banking solution doesn't support anything but Internet Explorer which is not available on any platform but Windows. As a shareholder, I'm concerned that we're losing customers and money because of this. I intend to bring this up at the shareholder's meeting. You're in the business of making the bank's shareholders money, not shilling for Microsoft. There is *no* reason not to support everybody's computer platform. Their money spends just as well.

        Sincerely,

        Large shareholder mac user

      • You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users.

        Personally, whenever I see a service that requires Windows (and only Windows) to access it, I avoid it.

        I changed banks because the internet banking client was Windows only (they've now gone web-based). The only thing I still have to do via Windows when it comes to interacting with outside groups is tax lodgement. If the Australian government ever releases a M

    • This won't replace office until (Score:5, Funny)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @04:03PM (#6465312)
      ...Apple puts a talking paperclip into TextEdit
      • It looks like you're trying to compete with our products! Would you like to:

        [] Make a better product and make us look like fools
        [] Make a better product but watch it fail as we FUD you to death
        [] Sell yourself to us

    • Mac IE (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Slur ( 61510 )

      Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac.

      Now come on. Everyone knows Microsoft dropped its support for IE because it wasn't making any money. ;-)

      On a more serious note, considering that the browser was a freebie, why didn't Microsoft continue to improve it after its initial release? Does anyone remember the fancy flash animation MS produced starring "Zippy" that showed IE with a built-in media player and other nifty features? WTF?

      Your point about MS Office is right on, though. Initially

  • This might work, but then again maybe not... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by danrees ( 557289 ) * <dan@nOsPam.dwrees.co.uk> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:26PM (#6464235) Homepage
    The problem with any application providing support for MS Office formats is that the format changes from version to version, therefore it is difficult to preserve the content and formatting of documents perfectly. Anybody using OpenOffice.org will notice that formatting done on MS Word is modified slightly when opened in OpenOffice.org - for documents where layouts are more complicated and space matters (e.g. CVs), this causes problems.

    If Apple can create a filter that preserves complex formatting, it should be on to a winner for home users. However, I somewhat doubt that Apple can do so, when Microsoft's own versions of Office can't even cope with changes in the file format...

  • Freeware app that gives similar functionality (Score:5, Informative)

    by xyrw ( 609810 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:27PM (#6464240) Homepage

    Here's a link to a freeware app that already enables Cocoa applications to do a similar thing, but with text only: AntiWord Service [devon-technologies.com]. It works on Mac OS X 10.1.5 and higher.

  • It works (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:34PM (#6464330)
    It works, but it's not perfect, in some of my documents there are some minor problems, mostly with escape characters. Though, more importantly the fonts are rendered beautifully, instead of the jagged fonts that one has to deal with when using Office v.X.

  • (no subject) (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by charlie763 ( 529636 )
    Apple should but GoBeProductive and develope it under the GPL. That would be phat!

  • Office Package Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Johnny Mozzarella ( 655181 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @03:45PM (#6465130)
    I have heard rumors of Apple working on an Office suite which includes a word processor called "Document" and a spreadsheet app cleverly called "Spreadsheet". It seems as though they are going to test and hopefully perfect the most important feature in TextEdit first, reading .doc files.

    Once they have the bugs worked out, they will release Document which will be able to open .doc files perfectly and resave them into Document's native XML format. Document will hopefully be available for Mac OS X and Windows.

    Microsoft's .doc format has a death grip on the business world. Unless there is an affordable alternative that can read .doc files it isn't going very far.

    The word processor is the only piece of the office package that most users need. Apple should make just Document for the PC and make it affordable. It will introduce many PC users to how software should be written. Like the iPod it will be a trojan horse that will hopefully cause them to consider a Mac for their next purchase.
  • Seriously.

    This is a great feature, it makes my day (no sarcasm), but when all's said and done, it's just a document format.

    So what I don't understand is:
    1) Why would MS think this is a *bad* thing?
    2) Why is everybody so enthousiastic, besides from the obvious, being that you can browse a Word document without opening Office or OpenOffice?

    ps: am not trying to insult developers here, just curious what this means to you enthousiasts out there...

    cheers.
    • Go price MS Office and then price out some of its competition. The network effects of having so many documents in that proprietary format allows them to extract a huge price bonus. This price bonus is enough to fund all the boat anchors of MS' unproductive divisions and to make MS one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world.

  • HOLY FUCK. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mikey-San ( 582838 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @04:04PM (#6465333) Homepage Journal
    I just got Slashdotted.

    So far, I'm holding up, thanks to Smallbits, my host. AWESOME host, also host of Bungie.org.

    I am going to make a t-shirt that says: "I've been Slashdotted. Have you?"

  • Fucking PDFs (Score:2, Funny)

    by pmsyyz ( 23514 )

    pudge, fucking warm us with a [PDF] like google does when linking to shitty PDF files. Thank you.

    Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption [useit.com]

    • Re:Fucking PDFs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BitGeek ( 19506 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @09:56PM (#6467750) Homepage

      I think Jacob Nielsen is the Rush Limbaugh of design: A blowhard with no grasp of the facts.

      IF he didn't pretend like his opinions were fact, or in some objective sense true, he wouldn't be as annoying.

      Hell, I know people who still think images on webpages are overkill... They're free to design their sites with that in mind if they want... but they don't go telling everyone that theirs is the One True Way.

      Nielson is not an authority- he's just opinionated.
    • Well the real question when the PDF opened how many of you instinctively tried to scroll down to see more of the document. They really should have put some better margins on the PDF file.

  • Shoot me if I am being simple minded, but I think this is going to turn into a serious problem.

    I think Apple is marginalising itself. The beauty of having Office v.X for the Mac is that I can handle all the files which my PC using friends and collegues send. I can edit them and send them back. (For example using "track changes" in Word.) The question them becomes: Will Apple ever be able to produce its own software which will read MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint files properly (And I mean properly, with

    • Having worked with a large number of cross-platform environments, I can assure you that the "problems" that occur with formatting also occur between Windows computers running various versions of Office. Or even the same version of Office. I once spent 20 minutes trying to explain to someone that there was nothing _I_ could do to make her resume look the same on my computer as it did on hers, since we both had Windows 2000, and we both had Office 2000, and the resume was an Office 2000 document, and used t

    • Will Apple ever be able to produce its own software which will read MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint files properly (And I mean properly, with no errors - you would be surprised how pissed off people get when there is a slight inconsistency between the platforms)

      This depends on whether the infinite number of monkeys MS employs as programmers can keep making enough changes to the file format between versions.

      The current climate and the latest license proposals from MS have focused the minds of business pe

  • Couldn't this be done 90% accurately with a plugin wrapper around a Abiword/KWord/OOffice.org importer ??
  • Does anyone know what's the status of AppleWorks development and where is it going?

  • How is this different from WordPad? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by putaro ( 235078 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @02:48AM (#6468901) Journal
    WordPad, bundled with Windows (at least it's in Win2K, I don't have an XP box to check) will open basic Word documents just fine. I'm still waiting for my Panther CD's so I can't check the limits of TextEdit.

    So, OS X will now have some basic functionality built into it that Windows does. That's good, but I don't think it's the end of MS Office.
    • One word: strategery.

      It's not the end of Office, certainly. But you have to look beyond just WordPad functionality. Being able to read a Word doc is the first step to making sure whatever alternative Apple develops for Office can actually be compatible WITH Office.

      There's no sense in taking on the industry leader in bloatware, er, "productivity software" if you can't make it easy for users to read and edit their legacy documents. Without this basic functionality -- and the corresponding ability to market
    • WordPad is an app. You can't easily embed it into your own.

      The stuff in Panther is built into the OS, not the TextEdit app. Big difference.

      (MS could change WordPad easily enough; creating new COM interfaces would do the trick)

  • Keep me guessing (Score:3, Funny)

    by switcha ( 551514 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:13AM (#6471472)
    Sure, but does it support the neato macro virii that help make office life so much of an edge-of-your-seat experience?
  • What's truly funny is that I remember that TextEdit in the very first public beta of OSX (a few years back) was already able to open Word docs. This feature never made it to any of the current upgrades though. I guess they had planned for this for a while, but MS b*tched at them a little too loud at the time. Now the question is: is this gonna make it in the released version this time around?!?

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