On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 03:44:10PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Incidently I've been thinking the best way to break Microsoft's monopoly > would be to force them to publish and make open all of their file formats > and such. How much easier would that make it for competing software to be > written if the MS office file formats were public domain? People talk > about having MS disclose the source of this or that MS program, but I > think all we really need is the file formats and other MS "standards" and > people could write software that is just as good or better that people > would be willing to use because it still edits an excel file with no > problems. Then Microsoft might have some competition.
The Word DOC format is actually published, to some degree. I believe the difficulty in interpreting the format on other platforms comes from the fact that DOC files are essentially serialized OLE objects. You have to implement Microsoft's OLE api, which apparently is not the same as some similar but open API that they provide to others. Here's the link I used as the source for this information, let me know if you get something different out of it: http://www.btinternet.com/~shaheedhaque/generator_wword8.htm --Levi ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the BYU UUG discussion mailing list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "UNSUBSCRIBE" as the message body Visit the BYU UUG website at: http://uug.clubs.byu.edu/
