Wordperfect and RTF
lux
Hi People.
Our company builds an application that integrates with rich text format
(RTF) compatible word processors.
Our application does not do much with the RTF files except store them and
do search and replace on them. Most word processors work well with our
application, but Corel's Wordperfect, version 7 has problems in and of
itself.
I have uncovered two problems with Corel Wordperfect version 7:
A) When it save Rich Text Format files, it mangles them.
To reproduce this problem do the following:
i) Create a document with a graphic insert in Wordpad. Save it as RTF.
ii) Open the document in Wordperfect. It will look and print fine. Save the
document in Wordperfect as RTF.
iii) Reopen the document with Wordperfect. It will now be mangled:
graphics gone, formatting lost, etc !!!!
B) Wordperfect does not call correctly (without errors) from the Windows 95
command line.
Our application uses word processors as agents to allow the user to work on
documents. When a user needs to edit an RTF document, s/he presses an
"Open" button, our application calls the agent (Wordperfect in this
instance) with the name of the file to edit and after a few seconds, the
user is in the word processor with their document. Users love this
integration and it generally works very well.
Our application gets the command line with parameters from the Windows 95
registry. These "command lines" can be viewed in Explorer-> View ->
Options -> File Types -> (RTF or WPF or …) -> Open -> Edit.
Wordperfect will open RTF documents fine with a Windows 95 right click on
RTF files with the following command line setting:
c:\program files\....\wpwin.exe /ddeex /conv "%1"
This string, however, does not execute without errors or properly on the
command line. All other word processors that we have integrated execute
their file association just fine on the command line. Wordperfect does not
!
(Some people refer to the above mentioned command lines as file association
settings.)
I have the following questions:
a) Has anyone else encountered these problems ?
b) Does anyone have any clue as to why these problems occur ?
c) Can anyone suggest a solution to the problems, other than to tell our
users to use a different word processor ?
Thanks in advance,
Kim Lux
Richard Cleaveland
You ask if anyone else has seen these problems. YES!. A genealogy
program I use creates RTF in three flavors - WORD and WP among them.
The WP version has had to be "tuned" for each version of WP; they have
not yet figured out how to tune it for WP8. Seems the WP people keep
changing what it does. I keep WP7 on my machines just to use with
this program's output.
They and I among other users have complained for months now but we
have failed to get any useful response from the WP people. One user
rep said he'd look into it, but then said he hadn't heard anything
from the developers and now even he won't respond to queries.
I keep WORD on my systems also in order to get good results when going
in via RTF.
Dick