TMG incompatibility with Open Office Writer

[RGC 0]

There have been several postings on the forum which have made reference to the fact that word files (*.doc) created by TMG, while opening ok in MSWord, when opened in Open Office Writer show images compressed to squares, sacrificing both aspect ratio and size. While it is possible to correct this in Open Office Writer with a few clicks per image, when there are many images this becomes quite burdensome.

 

I have made some tests that show that it is a characteristic of TMG's output that triggers this problem. A file including images developed in Word (or converted through Word) opens correctly in Open Office Writer.

 

As a user I would like to encourage the transition to Open Office for two reasons. While cost of the word processing program is not much of a factor for me, it certainly is for some others - Open Office is free. But the primary reason is that Word fails (aborts) if there are too many footnotes/endnotes in the TMG-created report. This acts in opposition to a genealogist's objective to clearly document the sources of information.

 

In conversation with Bob Velke a short time ago he indicated that this has been a Word problem for considerable time, and that Microsoft was notified of it several Word versions ago and has failed to fix it. This suggests that MS doesn't consider it much of a problem and we can't look forward to a fix very soon, if ever. There is some question of the number of footnotes generated which cause Word to fail; I know that it fails with 4208.

 

As a consequence of these factors, I'd like to encourage Wholly Genes to look into the problem to determine the cause of the incompatibility with Open Office Writer and either develop some kind of accommodation in TMG's output or work with the Open Office people to resolve the issue in Writer.

 

I should point out that the use of the unique footnote feature in TMG ameliorates the problem, at least in my case. It reduces the count of endnotes to 1189, which Word can handle. However my database is modest in size to many others I've seen noted here and on the TMG list.

 

Dick

[John Moran 0]

Dick-

My observation has been that Open Office Writer saves RTF files in a much more complicated format than the basic RTF output of TMG or UFT, even if the file is only opened and closed in Writer without modification.

 

Perhaps you can inspect the differences in a short sample RTF file before and after being opened in Writer to correct the graphic sizing problem. This may give a hint not only as to how TMG might handle the coding, but also give a hint as to a simple "Find and Replace" operation on the original RTF file when opened as Text and resaved.

John

[Terry Reigel 0]

Dick,

 

Resolving OO issues aside, there are a number of solutions avialable to Word users to open files with larger numbers of endnotes. From some experiments with my own data using an Ancestor Journal, I found I can open files containing many more notes by using other file types:

 

Using Word for Windows v8:

 

Largest file: 6 generations, 270 people, 4162 endnotes

 

Using "combined" endnotes (combines all citations for a tag into one note:

 

Largest file: 11 generations, 1122 people, 4705 endnotes

 

Using Word for Windows v2.x:

 

Largest file: 10 generations, 874 people, 10,046 endnotes

 

Using WordPerfect v8+ or RTF (then opening in Word)

 

Largest file: 12 generations, 1319 people, 13,750 endnotes

(not really the largest possible - I ran out of test data)

 

Using other file types may cause some issues. I understand that the Word v2.x format does not support all the features supported by later versions. I don't understand which, if any, TMG features might be effected. Simple narrative text is not so far as I can see. I did get some formatting issues with WordPerfect then importing into Word. If they can't be avoided, the could be fixed once in Word.

[John Moran 0]

There have been several postings on the forum which have made reference to the fact that word files (*.doc) created by TMG, while opening ok in MSWord, when opened in Open Office Writer show images compressed to squares, sacrificing both aspect ratio and size.  While it is possible to correct this in Open Office Writer with a few clicks per image, when there are many images this becomes quite burdensome. 

(snip) . . . . .

 

Dick

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Dick-

I found this posting about Open Office Writer picture sizing on an unrelated site. It may not be on target, but you might run it by your Open Office and TMG Gurus.

John

http://www.nabble.com/RTF:-Size-of-images-...t--t728421.html

[John Moran 0]

Dick-

Open Office Writer may be more dependent on "Styles" than MSWord. You and your Linux OOo Writer guru may want to have a look at OOo Frame Styles by using the F11 Key, and then clicking on the top middle "page" icon, which is Frame Styles.

 

It may be that TMG Journal Report exports of Word doc files (in recent builds 8 or 10) make some use of Styles directly, but I doubt it. I continue to look in (uncompressed, unencrypted) TMG RTF file exports for answers to questions you pose. But the answers are not to be found there - just more questions due to coding errors, or use of obsolete RTF specs by the 3rd party Wordport converter. This coding causes Footnote Style errors in OOo, in particular.

____________________________________________

 

If you do a Search for the string, "style", in the current MS RTF spec, you will find it. If you do a Search for the string, "style", in a Journal Report file exported from MSWord 2002 in RTF format, you will find it.

 

But if you do a Search for the string, "style" in a Journal Report exported directly from TMG, you will not find the word, "style"

_____________________________________________

To put things in perspective, go to Google and do a search for "Wordstar History" and read the first entry. Takes you back to the seventies and eighties.

 

(Note: WordStar and Sun StarOffice, from which Open Office Writer is derived, are apparently two different animals.)

John

[John Moran 0]

(FWIW)

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...e/o03flshr.mspx

[RGC 0]

Dick,

 

Resolving OO issues aside, there are a number of solutions avialable to Word users to open files with larger numbers of endnotes. From some experiments with my own data using an Ancestor Journal, I found I can open files containing many more notes by using other file types:(snip).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

THANK you, Terry, I'll immediately look into these solutions. I have no idea why I didn't get notified of your posting; I signed up to track this thread but it didn't seem to work. Attempts just now to do it resulted in a failure (perhaps because it thinks I'm already tracking it).

 

FYI all, I've reported the problem in the OOo bug forum, and it appears they are taking the incorrect-image-size problem seriously, accepting my (small) demonstration file and playing with it. Time will tell....

 

Dick