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Libre Office 4.0 was just released with a few improvements to the import/export translators for RTF and DOCX:
http://www.libreoffice.org/home/Discove ... perability
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0 ... and-fixes/

Question: If I install LibreOffice, could I get the benefit of the new translators by replacing the entire LibreOffice/Contents/ folder inside the NWP application package with a symlink pointing to the corresponding folder in LibreOffice?

I realize this would be an unsupported hack, and that I should save a copy of the unmodified NWP, but does it seem plausible and safe?

A further benefit of this would be that, when LibreOffice releases future updates, I would immediately get the benefit of any improvements in the import/export translators without waiting for them to be included in the next NWP update.

(This question is prompted merely by curiosity, not by any specific problems with the translators, nor by any impatience with NWP updates. I'm happy that you undertook the effort to develop InfoClick!)

Hi Bob,

Bob Stern wrote:Libre Office 4.0 was just released with a few improvements to the import/export translators for RTF and DOCX:
http://www.libreoffice.org/home/Discove ... perability
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0 ... and-fixes/

Yes indeed, and we're very pleased that RTF and DOCX compatibility is a focus for them. They also worked on cleaning up their code base, which is also appreciated.

Question: If I install LibreOffice, could I get the benefit of the new translators by replacing the entire LibreOffice/Contents/ folder inside the NWP application package with a symlink pointing to the corresponding folder in LibreOffice?

The answer is a definitive "no". The version of LibreOffice that NWP uses for file format translations has some additional modifications to make it responsive to NWP's translation requests.

Aside from that, we also patched some of their RTF code to fix some issues that cause mistranslations or crashes. We've already done some limited testing of LibreOffice 4.0 and it seems we'll need to refix these problems in the new code.

So the answer is that you'll have to wait for new versions of NWP to incorporate new versions of LibreOffice.

Thanks, Martin!