Short answer is no since the Word file format is proprietary. Abiword is another open source solution and offers similarly close compatibility. You might find that it does a better (or worse) job for a particular formatting issue. KWord doesn't do so well, but for some issues it might work. If you're looking for (nearly) perfect compatibilility you have 4 options. Wine will let you run the native Word binary under Linux, but AFAIK, Word needs to be already installed in a Windows partition on the same machine. A couple of years ago it needed to be on a W95/98 installation, but that may have been "upgraded". I suspect it suffers from some of the compatibility issues that also affect the Codeweavers product and Win4Lin. Codeweavers Wine ($), will let you install MS Office (and some other Windows) apps into a fake windows directory within Linux. It is pretty close to perfect for Word 97 and Word 2K, but has some minor imperfections w/ XP. Most of the problems seem to be with documents embedded within other documents or very table/figure references within documents. They do provide good support and you will find that most bugs are at least evaluated by the staff. Win4Lin ($) is similar to the Codeweavers product, but you need Windows 98 compatibility. It requires a specially modified Linux kernel (which is generally available). VMWare ($) is a true virtual machine system. It lets you install an actual copy of Windows (or any other i386 OS) onto Linux (or vice versa) and then install MS Word into that version of Windows. As far as binary compatibility, this is the best solution, but requires at least 2Gb of free disk space and is the slowest solution to your problem (you have to boot or at least unsuspend Windows after you boot Linux), although as virtual machines go, it is almost as fast as running natively since it doesn't try to change processor architecture. All are available for 30day demos. Bochs is another open source virtual machine, but it once took me 12 hours to install W98 into a Bochs virtual machine on a Pentium II box. Perhaps it is a bit faster now. HTH Paul
On Saturday 11 December 2004 05:12 am, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Hi. > > The OpenOffice Writer is quite compatible with Microsoft Word, > but not at 100%: when you save a file with Writer, and then open it with > Word, > some information turns out to be lost or modified. > Isn't there in the Linux world > any application that be *completely* Microsoft Word compatible? > > Rodolfo
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