[Oberon] Coping with Word documents

[easlab at absamail.co.za]

Thu Jan 13 21:49:09 MET 2005, Soren Renner said,
> > ... we have what is clearly the best OS and
> > language project in the world*1, yet almost 
> > noone will pay any attention to it.

 Peter E.  wrote:
> In many environments, editing of Word documents 
> is necessary.  Ref. http://www.abisource.com/

] a native OS X frontend

So It could run under linux ?

Yes, coping with Word documents is as essential as coping with
flu-virus or taxes.  This what I regularly [have to] do:-

* apparently all the formatting info is at the beginning and end
of the file -  although once I received a Word document containing
pictures.

* cut off the head and the tail
= find where the head stops and the real text starts
== eliminate the (line-len > display-width) in order to be able to READ
   the text.   
I use:  Mail.CutLines 76 *
= this can be problematic, since it cuts the line(s) at word breaks, so 
 there can be problems when there are no 'word breaks' for a string
of say 500 chars.
=== I use various heuristics to find the beginning of the 'real text,
    which is possible given the speed of n-o's cording.
----------------
Since the header-formatting-info is mostly non-ascii, perhaps someone
who is comfortable with RX.Tool can write a few lines to:
  delete all the non-ascii chars  ?
Although perhaps:
1.  this is too slow,
2. RX.Tool also has problems with lines being too long.


== Chris Glur.