On 2008-02-20, Linonut <linonut@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> * Roy Schestowitz peremptorily fired off this memo:
>
>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
>
> Here's the take-home message from that article:
>
> OK, I promised some workarounds. The good news is that for almost all
> common applications, trying to read or write the Office binary file
> formats is the wrong decision. There are two major alternatives you
> should seriously consider: letting Office do the work, or using file
> formats that are easier to write.
>
> Let Office do the heavy work for you. Word and Excel have extremely
> complete object models, available via COM Automation, which allow you
> to programmatically do anything. In many situations, you are better
> off reusing the code inside Office rather than trying to reimplement
> it. . . .
>
> 2. Same as above, but your web hosting environment is Linux. Buy
> one Windows 2003 server, install a fully licensed copy of Word
> on it, and build a little web service that does the work. Half
> a day of work with C# and ASP.NET.
If your going to use word 2003/07, it is really, really easy to write
wordml. I know, I just did this (converting wordml into other document
formats).
>
> . . .
>
> If you really want to generate fancy formatted Word documents, your
> best bet is to create an RTF document. Everything that Word can do
> can be expressed in RTF, but it's a text format, not binary, so
> you can change things in the RTF document and it'll still work.
> You can create a nicely formatted document with placeholders in Word,
> save as RTF, and then using simple text substitution, replace the
> placeholders on the fly. Now you have an RTF document that every
> version of Word will open happily.
>
It's even easier to just use wordml. RTF works as well, especially with
older versions of office. Yes, I've done this too :)
--
Tom Shelton
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