[YLUG] Handling OOXML

[john halewood]

On 01/11/2007, Arthur Clune <arthur at clune.org> wrote:
> Archive:  work.docx
>    inflating: [Content_Types].xml
>    inflating: _rels/.rels
>    inflating: word/_rels/document.xml.rels
>    inflating: word/document.xml
>    inflating: word/theme/theme1.xml
>    inflating: word/settings.xml
>    inflating: word/fontTable.xml
>    inflating: word/webSettings.xml
>    inflating: docProps/app.xml
>    inflating: docProps/core.xml
>    inflating: word/styles.xml
>
> Thanks to John H for the file.

Interesting. It doesn't seem to resemble much the file generated by
saving to 'xml' format (office 2007 has a dizzying amount of "save as"
options - I don't use it but I've got access to it via an MSDN
agreement). The xml version has more hypertext links that you can
shake a stick at and looks like garbage (but then I'd say that for the
majority of XML I've had to deal with - like c++ it might be a nice
language when it's finiished). You could possibly lean on your
collegues to save them in a format you can use.
 Strangely it reminds me if a similar situation I came across about 10
years ago at university, when all sorts of problems were being caused
by the lack of compatability between Office 95 and win 3.1x versions
of office/wordperfect(1). Looks like things don't change very much .
Backwards compatibility? that'd be the DOS prompt.

cheers
john

(1) and anyone who has ever attempted to write a physics/maths paper/d
phil etc in office and/or wordperfect will realise what LaTeX was
created for.