Attentive reader of this blog remembers that, besides improvements in the most frequently used file-formats, each major release of LibreOffice adds to the list of document file-formats that are freed from the dungeon of vendor lock. In a collaboration with re-lab's Valek Filippov and (then GSoC student and now Lanedo's LibreOffice developer) Eilidh McAdam, LibreOffice 3.5 brought the possibility to open and see the most commonly used Visio files to the FLOSS world. LibreOffice 3.6 was able to claim the most comprehensive coverage of CorelDraw file-format with the ability to open even the oldest CorelDraw 1 and 2 files that modern versions of CorelDraw are not able to open any more.
The latest major release of LibreOffice was also full of goodies. First, the fruitful collaboration of re-lab's Valek Filippov with (then GSoC student and now amazon.com employee) Brennan T. Vincent produced the first ever possibility of reading Microsoft Publisher files in the FLOSS world. Second, with the advent of Microsoft Office 2013 and change in the Visio 2013 file-format, LibreOffice extended the coverage of Visio file-format to all files any version of Visio ever produced.
LibreOffice 4.1 release is approaching quickly. And that is an excellent news for bad teenage poetry and other literary production from the late 80s and early 90s. With the up-coming new release, LibreOffice extends support for a host of pre-OSX MAC text formats. This is a result of a continuous effort to open as many legacy file-formats as possible to our users, and help them to settle for ODF.
This particular improvement was possible thank to the integration of libmwaw written by Laurent Alonso, LibreOffice contributor and already co-maintainer of libwps and of the Microsoft Works import filter inside LibreOffice. The horsepower doing the conversions, libmwaw is one of the libraries from the libwpd family. In the same way as libwps, libmwaw reuses libwpd's interfaces and the ODF generator classes in libodfgen in order to convert its callbacks into an xml stream in flat ODF file-format. The import filter lives in the module writerperfect.
The supported file-format include Microsoft Word for Mac from versions 1 to 5.1, Mac versions of Microsoft Works, different versions of ClarisWorks and AppleWorks, to name but a few. The list of supported file-format and of imported features is increasing literally every day. This promises further good news with every minor release of LibreOffice 4.1. More teenage poetry and bad litterature will be freed from the pit of discontinued software products.
After having found a way to get screenshots of some sample documents in their respective generating application, we are able to satisfy those readers that are hungry for pictures. First is a sample document in Mac Word 5.1 (1992) file-format opened in the originating application and in the up-coming LibreOffice 4.1:
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Following is a simple document with picture produced by Write Now 4.1 from about 1993. It demonstrates the reason why LibreOffice is frequently called the "Swiss Army knife" of file-formats:
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Following is an example of conversion of a document in MacWrite Pro 1.5 file-format from 1994:
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And, last but not least is an example of conversion of a wordprocessing documents in AppleWorks 6.0 from the late 90s. The software was discontinued by Apple with the end-of-life of their PowerPC series. But LibreOffice can resurrect your documents:
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Pretty exciting news! But the most exciting thing is that you can be part of this adventure. Join the fun by submitting bugs or by fixing your personal itches. So, if you want to help, patches can be sent to libreoffice-dev mailing list. And, do not forget to find a way to join the #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet other developers. We can promise you that you will have a lot of fun in the LibreOffice community.
