"LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"

https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/111716610017454919

by sohkamyung • 3 years ago

453 189 3 years ago

vrmiguel• 3 years ago

Unsurprising this would be the case since LibreOffice strives for compatibility while MS would want clients to upgrade versions to newer, more lucrative editions

what-the-grump• 3 years ago

Or you know, standard open formats if you prefer them. But then there is always that MS trolls in comments.

I converted, 100gb of xls/doc files to upload to SharePoint and netted something like 5x space savings just by resaving in an open format.

I am not surprised at all that Libre is better at opening old files, there are files that Microsoft wont let you open without going back into security settings and allowing them, we were converting a library that goes back nearly 30 years, lots of stuff dated 20+ years ago, why would you carry compat for this trash today?

chris_wot• 3 years ago

Standard formats? I don't think so. The "standard format" they use for OOXML is not compliant with the strict version - so loose LibreOffice couldn't go to the standard to fix the compatibility issues.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

Back in the days, Microsoft took backwards compatibility very seriously, maybe more than anyone else besides mainframes. Going as far as making special cases so that applications that relied on some bugs or undocumented features continued working.

coryrc• 3 years ago

IIRC not for Word file formats. Usually only the previous version would definitely convert, any older and things started breaking. And it would always save in the newest version by default so everyone else has to update to edit your file (there were free readers, but they were separate programs and I don't know how popular they were).

subtra3t3• 3 years ago

Somebody more knowledgeable than me can correct me, but iirc some of the earlier versions of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 were incompatible with the latest version of Windows at the time that was unreleased at the time of the game's launch (because RCT2 used a memory management bug? I don't remember) so the Windows team coded up a special exception for RCT2 because they knew that users would blame Windows rather than the RCT2 team if the game failed to launch). This patched version of Windows ended up shipping.

I have no source to back me up. This is something I read about sometime back and it's probably lost in some deeply nested bookmark folder I'll never open.

rrr_oh_man2• 3 years ago

How I imagine the conversation:

  "It took a lot of work, but LibreOffice 7.6.4 can now open a wide range of word processor documents from pre-1994 on both Windows and Mac machines."
  "Can it edit .docx files without screwing up formatting yet?"
  "No, but who uses THAT?"

(shamelessly adapted from https://xkcd.com/619/)

david422• 3 years ago

Many many years ago I was distributing my resume as MSWord documents that I had so nicely crafted in LibreOffice. Years later I happened to open one of those resumes in actual Word and realized all my careful formatting was completely trashed.

toast02• 3 years ago

That's ok. HR departments were going to trash the formatting even if it looked good in MS Word.

They manage to trash the formattimg for plain text resumes too.

vidmak2• 3 years ago

It's not just between LibreOffice and Word. Up until at least Office 2016, .docx formatting would regularly break for me between Word versions or between Office for Windows/Mac. Admittedly, Microsoft has got better with this as of late, but the .odt format is much more solid.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

I stick to PDF for that sort of thing. No need for them to edit your resume, right?

notatoad• 3 years ago

that xkcd has aged beautifully.

gizmo686• 3 years ago

Back during the Windows 7 upgrade cycle, my company discovered that the old timecard software they were using no longer worked. Fortunately, the IT department came up with a solution: issue everyone in the commpany an Ubuntu VM, and have them run the software under Wine. That went on for years until the eventually switched over to a web based solution.

taspeotis2• 3 years ago

Water under the bridge but Microsoft takes compatibility very seriously and provides tools for you to write your own compatibility patches:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-t...

senkora• 3 years ago

I bet that the timecard application was a 16 bit executable. 32 bit Windows was able to run 16 bit executables using the NT Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM), but 64 bit Windows couldn't.

Wine is however able to run 16 bit executables on 64 bit hosts using their version of NTVDM.

bluedino• 3 years ago

We once bought Parallels licenses for 3 marketing users that demanded Macs.

The main reason was so they could our timecard software. We could have just gave them a $2 RFID card like the production employees, but then they would have to walk down to the time clock and "punch in".

I think they also ended up using it for the Windows version of Outlook because there was some feature they wanted to use that the Mac version did not have.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

My first mac at work was around 2009. To facilitate using all the internal tools all mac users were issues a windows virtual machine (vmware) that booted the company maintained windows image. Some of that stuff included some things that were dependent on IE 6 era APIs. Which at that point were already deprecated. But MS still supported that stuff.

The amazing stuff was that that vm ran circles around my previous windows laptop, which at that point was three years old. Just way faster than that ever was. Virtual machines and emulators are a good solution for legacy applications. Much easier than pretending ancient APIs are still supported. MS could have saved themselves a lot of grief by just embracing that decades ago and breaking compatibility with each new windows version. Just run the old crap in some vm or emulator. Apple has done that a few times when they switched CPU architectures and when they introduced OS X. They of course removed legacy support as well. But the point is valid: emulation works great.

And it works well enough with Linux support in windows these days; so why not apply that for legacy stuff as well. There's no reason why you wouldn't be able to run everything from the DOS era forty years ago up until now on a modern laptop. And there's no reason to burden modern APIs with all that crap.

aquova• 3 years ago

My girlfriend is a fan of the old point-and-click Nancy Drew games. Nearly all of them are sold on Steam, and while some work fine, others won't even launch or have immediate breaking issues. We discovered that the games run better (granted, not really well enough to actually play them..) on Linux via Steam Proton than they do on modern Windows.

JoshTriplett• 3 years ago

Some of the Nancy Drew games are supported in ScummVM, which means you'd be able to play them in higher resolution on many different platforms.

climb_stealth• 3 years ago

I have had much better experiences with gog.com instead of Steam for old games. They tend to actually make sure something runs before putting it up for sale.

Might be worth checking out for you. Though I see only one Nancy Drew game there.

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

I worked for a company once whose software was written for bigger monitors (and that size ONLY) that was common in the day.

So, as a customer you got a free properly sized monitor with your software purchase. True story.

blibble• 3 years ago

wine is better at running everything prior to Windows 7 than current Windows

lolinder2• 3 years ago

This hasn't been my experience at all.

WINE does fine for the top 10k or so most common apps. But whenever I've tried something in the long tail, I've been disappointed by cryptic error messages that don't turn up any useful answers in a search.

Meanwhile, Windows's compatibility mode settings for Win XP have worked fine every time I've tried.

The problem with Windows isn't a lack of backwards compatibility, the problem is that Windows 11 is Windows XP with lots of cruft added on top over the decades.

o11c• 3 years ago

The reason WINE error messages often don't have google hits is because they're generally notes saying "new code needs to be written here".

elzbardico• 3 years ago

The problem with Windows isn't backwards compatibility, the problem is that Windows 11 is Windows XP with lots of cruft added on top over the decades.

It is not only cruft but also:

1 - Security. Lots of stuff that doesn't work it is because of features that couldn't be made secure and had to be removed from windows.

2 - Developers that used undocumented behavior that ended up being removed in modern windows versions, a lot of times because of the first item. Being undocumented behavior, it is a lot more probable that WINE doesn't implement it. And sometimes this was not a fault of the developer, but from a particular development environment and framework he used.

ink_13• 3 years ago

Windows XP was arguably Windows 2000 with a Fisher-Price UI bolted on, which in turn was "just" Windows NT with the Win98SE shell bolted on, so there's that, too.

(My MS kernel developer friends might disagree with this assessment, though)

sys_64738• 3 years ago

You should be able to run these under WSl2 in Windows 11 then, I assume?

techmeme-23• 3 years ago

Abiword does OK with old .doc files, if anyone was wondering

torstenvl• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, AbiWord is effectively abandonware on Mac and Windows.

I tried compiling it for Mac recently and there is code that was deprecated in 2016 with the release of macOS Sierra.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

it's better at reading UTF8 CSV files than Excel, too.

recursive• 3 years ago

There is probably nothing that can read CSVs that does it worse than Excel.

seanw4442• 3 years ago

An internal tool I'm responsible for maintaining (that coworkers at my company use) consumes CSVs, and a lot of the time they're made by less-technical employees who use Excel to create/edit them. Very often Excel causes unexpected bugs that baffle me when the tool can't parse it. One time it surprised me when all the cells looked right in Excel itself, but when I popped it into Emacs, there were ~15 extra commas at the end of every row. Don't know what world that would be expected behaviour in, but alright.

hackideiomat• 3 years ago

=cmd|' /C calc'!A0

mmarquezs• 3 years ago

I don't understand why is so bad. If you use the insert data from file it ask you to choose separator and all that, great works fine.

If I open the CSV directly it doesn't and unless the files follows your system settings for separator and date a d similar it opens it wrong.

johnchristopher5• 3 years ago

Yeah, well... Just don't assume the doc/docx file you are working on with multiple revisions and comments and you are dutifully saving every 5 minutes will open next time you try loading it... Libreoffice will eat your document sooner or later if you edit a word file [0].

Switch to Libreoffice file format then convert to doc/docx then send back that doc/docx file.

[0] it's sneaky, basically Libreoffice will show you your edits and let you manipulate and modify the document as wish but what it saves into the file is corrupted and you will only notice it next time you open that file. Sometimes it's a mismatched tag in the internal xml representation (can be fixed), sometimes huge chunk of the doc will be missing (can't be fixed).

vidmak2• 3 years ago

This. LibreOffice once erased all the footnotes in an article I was editing as a .docx. Never had such problems with .odt.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

Libreoffice will eat your document sooner or later if you edit a word file

To be fair, Word will won't eat it, but it will eventually shred it quite well to the point where there is no practical difference.

The Word's format is just something to avoid.

snvzz2• 3 years ago

Please do not work on docx.

Import docx if necessary, but work on the OASIS OpenDocument format.

Switch to Libreoffice file format then convert to doc/docx then send back that doc/docx file.

If you need to send work to a msoffice user, just send OpenDocument. Office can open them. Should there issues, it's more likely to be their bug, not libreoffice's.

MS Office users need to get used to working with the standard document format, which is what OpenDocument is.

aaronbrethorst• 3 years ago

Ubuntu Bug #1 has been closed for over 10 years. Time to let it go.

jbstack2• 3 years ago

If you need to send work to a msoffice user, just send OpenDocument. Office can open them. Should there issues, it's more likely to be their bug, not libreoffice's.

In the real world, we can't all afford to be this idealistic. When I need to send someone a document for work purposes and they can't open my .odt file in MS Word (something that frequently happens to me), I'm not going to say "You need to get used to working with the standard document format. It isn't my problem that you can't open it - it's more likely to be your bug, not Libreoffce's". I'm going to send them a .docx so that we can both get on with our work.

fsloth• 3 years ago

”MS Office users need to get used to working with the standard document format, which is what OpenDocument is.”

This is not how the world, in which most of Fortune 500 operate in, works. The software and format people use, is the one usually mandated by their working environment. If your org operates in Office, you operate in Office. The question 99.9% of all users are concerned with is ”I want to review/edit this document I got from Sarah/need to send to Jane”. Not ”does this conform to standard xyz”.

Standars are just paper that software may support. The real question is phenomenological - is there a support, at what level, and is the software vendor incentivized to implement support.

There is no ”this format must be followed” convention in userspace software (sadly) unlike in say, hardware drivers for a desktop os. Even if the standard would have an ISO label.

trelane2• 3 years ago

Office can open them.

Maybe, but it's probably more reliable for them to just grab LibreOffice to open it.

It's much easier to get LibreOffice than MS Office.

bsdpufferfish3• 3 years ago

I can't imagine working on large document in WYSWIG opaque formats anymore. Plain text file formats with version control is the only scalable toolset that won't lose your work.

charlieyu13• 3 years ago

And there are no file formats that support it, unless you go to something like Markdown.

MathMonkeyMan4• 3 years ago

Markdown-in-git used to be used for tech specs at my company. Now we switched to Google Docs, which means we need to maintain a "change log" section at the bottom because Docs history is... not a commit log.

Markdown in git, reviewed as a pull request on GitHub, is the best way to do an RFC. I will die on this hill.

Alternatively, I wonder if an old school message board would work. Each RFC gets its own (sub)board, and within that board each thread is a discussion about some topic -- an individual review, debate about a section, etc. I wonder if such a thing already exists, _specifically_ for technical specification review.

wolverine8762• 3 years ago

It's true for any non-native format (of some complexity) in any application.

Vendor A's development team spends all their time developing, testing, bug-squashing, updating, etc. Format A, and developing, etc. their application, and developing the two to work together. They also have all the bug data, data from users, etc.

Vendor B can't possibly keep up. They have their own application and format to develop. They lack the institutional knowledge, the data, etc. There's no way their application will correctly handle complex data in Format A nearly as reliably as Vendor A (which will have bugs itself).

And in this case, Microsoft's Office team probably has far greater resources overall than LibreOffice.

davidgerard3• 3 years ago

Got bug numbers on any of those? It's not clear what you mean. How recent was the LO?

johnchristopher5• 3 years ago

I won't bother with providing more than this: https://ask.libreoffice.org/search?q=SAXParseException%3A%20...

Feel free to craft problematic docx that trigger conversion errors and report them as bug for the converter.

dfox• 3 years ago

Similar effect can happen the other way around and in fact I have seen that more often (albeit mostly 10 years ago):

- create DOCX with change tracking in Word

- edit that in LibreOffice and save multiple times

- open it in Word modify something and save

- Word cannot load that file. Loading and saving in LibreOffice fixes that.

All cases I have seen involved change tracking, which is probably not that surprising as the internal representation of change tracking in DOCX is totally brain damaged (even more than the rest of that "dump RTF and random crap as XML" format).

6c696e7578• 3 years ago

it's sneaky

I don't know if I would call LibreOffice sneaky here, they're the good guys IMO enabling you to break the clutches of MS Office

johnchristopher5• 3 years ago

I am speechless.

empyrrhicist• 3 years ago

These days it seems at least faster at opening even new Word documents, or maybe that's the network delay of the OneDriveification at work?

Don't even get me started on Adobe Creative Cloud.

g-w1• 3 years ago

Yep! I got some old word files off a floppy disk from 1996 and LibreOffice was the only thing I could find that could read them.

fluxem• 3 years ago

It’s great for all the people still living in 1992. The rest want good collaboration tools with a grammar checker

p-e-w• 3 years ago

LibreOffice supports grammar checking with LanguageTool, which blows Word's grammar checker out of the water.

happymellon2• 3 years ago

Fragmented sentence. Please rewrite your comment.

[Edit] I guess someone doesn't get the joke about how bad Words grammar checker is. It used to flag so much stuff as "fragmented" and didn't suggest improvements.

jakearmitage• 3 years ago

To the Microsoft apologizers: Can't you be happy that open source software provides solutions to problems users face?

neelc• 3 years ago

I WORK at Microsoft 365 (not on Word), and it's actually good LibreOffice can read old Word files even if Word can't. I wasn't even born until 1997, tho when I was young I played a lot with MS-DOS and Win9x, since my toys were old PCs.

The reality is, both MS Office and LibreOffice are legacy messes. In the 90s MS aggressively broke compatibility to get users to upgrade, which is why LO can read it. Now MS is excellent at compatibility, because the focus is subscription software your employer pays for.

bugglebeetle4• 3 years ago

I use LibreOffice to open all my CSV files because somehow, in the year 2024, Excel can’t do that without messing them up. And yes, I know about the import wizard that still manages to mess them up at least some of the time.

KronisLV• 3 years ago

I use LibreOffice to open all my CSV files

I really love the preview, where you can choose what delimiters and character encoding you want to work with, which row to start from and so on. It's so very user friendly and nice to use.

bugglebeetle4• 3 years ago

It’s the best! I have no clue how Excel continues to be so awful at this, by contrast.

Foobar85682• 3 years ago

You should use Power Query for this usage, something like Get Data, From File, yada yada

bugglebeetle4• 3 years ago

I should double click on the file and it open correctly, like LibreOffice does when I set it as the default for this file type.

noufalibrahim• 3 years ago

A Linux user friend of mine once told me that he saves his files as .doc. His argument was that if he saved as .odt, only libreoffice would be able to read it but with .doc, both platforms (LO and word) would "work fine".

raincole2• 3 years ago

One of my "culture shock" from game dev industry was the number of professional artists who paint with Clip Studio Paint but use .psd as exchangeable format[1].

[1]: Of course .psd isn't an exchangeable format. It's proprietary. But just like your friend's case, CSP can kinda read/write .psd, while Photoshop can't read .clip at all.

subtra3t3• 3 years ago

Could you share some other "culture shocks" from game dev?

herbst• 3 years ago

To be fair I did that too when I was still in school and regularly shared files, just for the simplicity. However I rarely used more than default formatting so it didn't really matter

professoretc• 3 years ago

It's rather ironic that the one old file format I've tried to open in LibreOffice, namely, old StarOffice 5 files, do not open. (LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, which was the open-sourcing of StarOffice.) The converters were removed to simplify the codebase.

jonhohle• 3 years ago

If they are converters, I wonder how difficult it would be to make them standalone utilities that did the format conversion and nothing more (assuming there doesn’t need to be manual intervention). I’m sure there is complexity but it seems like StarOffice is a fixed format at this point, and OpenDocument has some previous fixed version that could be targeted.

Not that anyone should expect different, but Apple has not preserved backwards compatibility with their iWork formats and I have several legacy documents that I need to find old versions to open.

davidgerard3• 3 years ago

LO now has libstaroffice, which should read them. What happens with recent LO?

theandrewbailey• 3 years ago

Try opening with Libreoffice 3.x. A lot of support for Staroffice was dropped in LO 4.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Feature...

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

And Wine is better at running some older Windows software than Windows.

We have a full circle. "The job ain't done until Word won't run".

nogajun• 3 years ago

Never open old Japanese Word files in LibreOffice. It will destroy the file.

This is because old Japanese Word files are saved in Shift JIS, but LibreOffice opens them in UTF-8.

xvilka• 3 years ago

Do you know if there is an issue for that particular problem in their Bugzilla[1]? If not, have you tried opening a new one? Could you share a sample to reproduce? Because I tried to search for "Shift JIS" on Bugzilla and found nothing.

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Similar story: I managed to run a Windows XP-era game to run on Ubuntu but not Windows 11. The issue is that the game uses some sort of Direct3D which doesn't work on Windows 10 or later. I don't want to install Windows XP/7/8 on the a machine, and virtual machines have bad support for graphics acceleration. But somehow it can run in Wine on a "real" Ubuntu installation after a bit of poking around and getting the correct files.

And what's even funnier? I installed Wine in Ubuntu running in WSL on a Windows 11 machine, and the game runs in that environment! Never thought I would run an old game in such a convoluted way.

tiptup300• 3 years ago

I've been wanting to run old Photoshop in this way.

Was the process straightforward?

lolinder2• 3 years ago

How old is the Photoshop? I was recently able to run Macromedia Flash 2004 in Windows XP compatibility mode without any hiccups.

squarefoot• 3 years ago

This does not surprise me at all. WINE under Linux through Yabridge runs perfectly some very old (20+ years) but still excellent audio plugins from the Win98/XP era that have problems or don't work at all on newer Windows versions. Gaming also benefits from this incredibly faithful level of emulation (WINE Is Not an Emulator), and as of today many Windows games, including newer ones, can be installed in a transparent way under Linux using WINE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg1NiXtrJ6g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b50Stm8gu4

phone8675309• 3 years ago

The Steam Deck runs Linux, and I can get many games that shit the bed on Windows 7, 8, or 10 but run perfectly fine under 98 and XP to run under Proton.

Lazonedo• 3 years ago

I installed Wine in Ubuntu running in WSL on a Windows 11 machine, and the game runs in that environment! Never thought I would run an old game in such a convoluted way.

You don't need WSL.

https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag

Compiled wined3d dlls that work on windows.

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk

Works on windows.

Just drop them in the game folder and the game should load them instead of the real directx.

There's also other implementations of old APIs to keep old video games running, some of them are even used by linux users who use wine, like dgVoodoo :

http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/ (supports Glide, a proprietary API from the 3dfx era cards, along with dx 1-7, 8.1 and 9)

https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw (fixes all issues you can have with DirectDraw, an old 2d API, can have its use for both windows users and people who use wine on linux)

https://github.com/otya128/winevdm run 16 bit apps on 64 windows

This, along with Windows's own compatibility mode tweaks, should run almost any game that has ever been released on Windows, without having the heavy overheard of a VM (as far as I know, WSL doesn't even know how to free memory it has claimed).

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Thanks! This didn't turn in my previous search. Will give it a try.

BeefWellington2• 3 years ago

I've recounted a similar story to this in the past: Basically some custom DOS app being used at a small chain of quick oil change places wouldn't run on Windows 7+ anymore, regardless of compatibility settings but worked fine on Linux under wine. This was done as a stopgap until they could redevelop the application. Because of the experience they had with their console app, they kept it a console app and just had its replacement modernized and written to run in a linux shell (saved all their licensing costs too). They seemed pretty happy in the end.

Microsoft moved away from the core tenet of backwards compatibility at all costs more than a decade ago seemingly across the entire company all at once.

analog31• 3 years ago

Sincere question: Did that core tenet become incompatible with security against malware? Were the attack surfaces too big when supporting the old stuff?

Kwpolska• 3 years ago

It is infeasible and unmaintainable for them to be compatible with everything they have ever released since the 1980s. 16-bit DOS and Windows applications don't run on 64-bit versions of Windows.

hartator• 3 years ago

Can’t it just be emulated?

bbanyc2• 3 years ago

A while back I read a piece by, I think, Joel Spolsky on the "design" of the XLS format. It was mostly a dump of Excel's internal memory structures to disk, with some optimizations to speed up saving and loading on the slow disks of the time. He seemed quite satisfied with how well the software performed but all I was thinking is "any other program trying to deal with those files is screwed." And "any other program" includes later versions of Excel.

It'd be nice to have some documentation of the internals of old DOC and XLS formats, just for the sake of recovering old files for archival purposes, but it's likely that Microsoft never bothered documenting them, even internally.

happymellon2• 3 years ago

This is also true of DOC. It was just a dump of the internal representation of Word.

Hence why they had to completely overhaul it with DOCX/XLSX when we had the open standards requirements come in. There was no possible way for Microsoft to document it. Although it doesn't help that DOCX/XLSX have tags for "Internal binary dump of Word/Excel" so they also fall into the same trap.

mjburgess• 3 years ago

They would, presumably, just need to release the header files?

All file formats are, in the end, just memory structures written in binary.

anticensor• 3 years ago

Then their dark history would have been obvious.

rrr_oh_man2• 3 years ago

YES, it's an excellent read!

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...

davidgerard3• 3 years ago

Microsoft has in fact documented these old formats, because they were forced to in antitrust actions!

Per Spolsky, they're an absolute shower. But they are, technically, documented!

melagonster• 3 years ago

This help me at least once. office365 don't support a old doc format, use Libre office save it as new version...

m-i-l• 3 years ago

Back in the mid-late 1990s I worked for a software company producing anti-virus software, and scanning Word files for macro viruses was one of those things they had to do. However, they weren't able open Word 1.0 files, so they brought over some actual Microsoft employees from the US to help. For a relatively small (at the time) UK company that was actually quite a big thing and the only time I'm aware they did something like that. It was all a bit hush-hush, but the story I heard was that Microsoft had lost the original source code to read and write Word 1.0 format files (although they still had compiled binaries), so new code had to be reverse-engineered.

submeta• 3 years ago

I have word documents from 1997-1999 that are useless. The recent Word version does not open them. I open the documents in Nisus Writer on my Mac, but the formatting is basically useless. I‘ll give it a try in LibreOffice.

blackoil2• 3 years ago

You can find Word 2003-2007 and use that to convert it.

japanman185• 3 years ago

This LibreX for open source products really needs to stop. Also the loose-attribution of panasian or ancient greek/latin…

whalesalad• 3 years ago

LibreOffice - in my experience - is also much better about dealing with huge CVS files.

dusted• 3 years ago

WINE is better at running old Windows software than Windows, so there seems to be some consistency at least.

AdmiralAsshat• 3 years ago

Pity that the same can't be said of modern Word files. My father asked me for help in converting a book he had written in Word to an EPUB. I opened it up in LibreOffice so that I could try to fix a few things like insert a proper ToC (he generated his by hand, and is constantly fiddling with the page numbers whenever he changes something). LO renders it well enough that I can see the intent, but there are formatting artifacts galore, and as soon as I start fiddling with anything, it seems like I've consigned it to a limbo state where it looks like crap in both LO and Word.

Regrettably, my personal devices are all Linux or Android only at this point, so, I lack a proper copy of Word to fix it for him.

yesco• 3 years ago

If this is still an issue for you I believe you can convert/import docx files into ebooks via calibre, from there you can just use calibre's ebook editor to fix things up

extraduder_ire• 3 years ago

Is the difference between the macos version of word and the windows version of word significant here? I have to assume microsoft didn't ship a whole COM compatibility layer office for mac, like apple did with objective-c when they put safari on windows.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Google Docs is now also a roach motel for DOCX files. It is apparently no longer possible to export as DOCX. I am rather disappointed, but not surprised. I have become quite skilled and experienced with Google Docs and Sheets, but frankly I'd prefer, for reasons of compatibility and interoperability, to author stuff in Microsoft Word instead.

"LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"

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