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MSWordView

last update: July 28, 1998

MSWordView is a program that can understand the microsofts word 8 binary file format (office97), it currently converts word into html, which can then be read with a browser.

See http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/MSWordView.html

Current Features include

• ability to understand fastsaved files as well as non-fastsaved files.
• conversion of word header paragraph style into appropiate header levels of html.
• conversion of font attributes such as italic, bold and font size into html tags
• conversion of word tables into html tables.
• conversion of ms symbol and wingding font into gif pics for html output, so math done directly in word shows up fairly alright, note not equation editor, thats an ole embedded type
• encoding of non-west-european ascii languages into utf-8 encoding, which should work with at least netscape.
• some understanding of lists, lists are suprisingly difficult.
• slightly less understanding of headers and footers.

Non Supported Features include

• text justification
• embedded graphics or other embedded types
• guaranteed proper handling of headers and footers
• fully correct conversion of tab stops and other formatting done by the user done with whitespace
• correct conversion of lists, all lists become bullet pointed lists (<ul>)
• word 6 and 7 etc arent currently supported, just word 8. mswordview cant understand these formats as they're somewhat different.

Defects are

• mswordview uses laola to extract the ole streams from the document, and on occasion laola cant cope with some files, i.e corrupt docs and some large docs.