[odf-discuss] Corel Support For ODF and OOXML

[marbux]

No. I have the same problem. But I can tell you from past experiences as a
WordPerfect Office beta tester that the beta testing group will be small and
its membership will close very quickly. If anyone wants to be a beta tester,
I'd suggest immediate application, stressing your familiarity with ODF or an
impressive role as an IT specialist. Corel has said that they are primarily
seeking participation from CIOs in the beta test.

I'm not really hopeful about the quality of the ODF and OOXML support in
WordPerfect. The company's developers have a heavy bias toward the graphical
side and there last major effort to improve the quality of the WordPerfect
DOC filters resulted in near-flawless round-tripping in terms of
photo-quality reproduction of formatting, but a DOC opened by WordPerfect
would fall apart if edited because of the amount of cruft added to achieve
PDF-like replication of formatting. The release of WP Office 2000 was
quickly followed by more than a half-dozen downloadable scripts created by
users to strip the cruft from such a document so that it could be edited and
returned.

It's conceivable to me that Corel learned a lesson from that and will shoot
for utility rather than PDF-like replication of what an OOo or MS Word user
will see, but I'm not holding my breath. Corel management has never had a
good grasp of the office productivity software market, in no small part
because they pink-slipped every last ex-WordPerfect Corp./Novell developer
in 1999 and turned development over to the graphics guys in Ottawa. Even
before that, they goofed big time by acquiring only the major WordPerfect
Office apps from Novell and let Novell keep the rest, e.g., what became
Novell Groupwise. Corel management never caught on that WordPerfect was more
a development platform for system integrators than a retail channel product
equivalent to Corel Draw. They very effectively killed the product with that
myopic set of eyes on, offering bulk pricing deals to major software retail
houses that allowed them to sell WordPerfect more cheaply than Corel's
wholesale price to system integrators. Microsoft spotted that mistake and
pounced. Guess what? The system integrators switched to MS Office.

To boot, WordPerfect's processing architecture is too radically different
from OOo and Word's to offer both easy editing and photo-quality replication
of formatting. And the lack of Unicode support in WordPerfect has been
another interop barrier for years.

I'd love to be surprised here and have been thinking about running WinXP
virtually to regain the ability to use WordPerfect anyway. I'm totally
frustrated by the task of formatting complex documents in OOo. As with MS
Word, it invariably takes me at least ten times as long to format a complex
document in OOo as it would in WordPerfect, and that ignores the instances
where I couldn't pull it off, such as creating a template for a basic law
office "pleading" document. As law office tech consultant Ross Kodner always
says, "friends don't let friends word process without Reveal Codes." :-)

So please send up a flare if Corel got it right on ODF support. Otherwise,
I'll probably stick with one of the older versions, at least until the
clean-up scripts are available and the first service pack is out. Lord, I
wish StarDivision had decided to clone WordPerfect Office rather than
Microsoft Office or [gasp] gone beyond both with the best of both worlds
running from the server side.

Best regards,

BUCK "MARBUX" MARTIN
  Director of Legal Affairs
  OpenDocument Foundation
  Contact:
<http://www.opendocumentfoundation.us/contact.htm>
-- Universal Interop Now!
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