Outlook installation

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2019 at 22:48, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> WordML was slightly different from OOXML. The period during which the
> save format was a plain .xml file with embedded Base64-encoded images
> was mercifully short.

I did a little Googling and you're right -- apparently Office 2003
does have XML support, and it's a pre-OOXML definition. It's not the
default format, though,  and I've actually never seen it. But I only
have Word installed, nothing else.

> I don't see the problem, I'm afraid. Unzip a .docx file

I repeat myself with emphasis:

> > With the old formats, you could at least recover raw text from a
> > *damaged file* with tools such as the Unix ``strings'' command. With

I don't care what you can do with an intact, working file. So long as
it works, all is fine. It's when it doesn't work and the customer gets
a corrupted file that I often got called in.

A corrupted Zip is junk. A corrupted .DOC can have the raw text
extracted, simply and easily.

The #1 way of recovering a corrupted MS Office file is to open it in
LibreOffice, but there were about 2 decades of doing this when
LibreOffice didn't exist and I had to do it by hand.

> (Better to use proper XML utilities such as LTXML2, but OOXML is unique
> among document formats in not using white-space in element content, so
> there are usually no newlines over which start-tags might have been split.)

As I said: before the tech-writing stage of my career, I almost never
touched XML directly. Happier times.

> I can't imagine the horror of actually having to use a wordprocessor for
> doing actual writing, though. I'm a plaintext person.

I only use Word for 1 thing. The outliner. I seem to be the only
person left who knows it's there.

No other editor in the world offers me the power of the Word outliner.

Trying to edit text -- plain, formatted, XML, whatever -- in a flat
text editor is _painful_ to me, and nobody understands what we have
lost. Outliners were _everywhere_ in the 1980s and early 1990s. The
most successful pre-MS Office presentation package for the Mac was
MORE! which was an enhanced outliner.

I can't described how brain-damaged and broken flat editors are to
someone who doesn't know how to use an outliner. All I can offer is
approximate comparisons.

Say you are used to a powerful editor such as Vim or Emacs, or even
Gedit or Notepad++. And I take it off you and instead I give you:

copy con: file.txt

That is what using a flat editor feels like when compared to an
outliner. I have been deprived of the single most powerful editing
tool there is -- structure -- and it doesn't matter how many macros,
regexes, and fancy editor syntax. If the file is flat, it's crippled.

Formatting, schmormatting. I don't care. It does that. I don't use it.
Mostly all I need is bold, underline, italic and unformatted for code
snippets. Markdown does most of what I need.

But without folding, without hiding, without collapsing down to
headers, navigating, expanding, unfolding, etc. they are all just toys
to me.

Outliners don't make a text file 3-dimensional, but it's a sort of 2.5
D. There's structure and it helps.

It would be _ideal_ for HTML and XML. But nothing understands it.
Oxygen has a very clumsy block-hiding function but it's hopelessly
clumsy. It needs to be in-stream, in file, as part of the document or
it's worthless to me.


-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053