TextMaker: Should we support FreeBSD at all?

[Martin Kotulla]

twig les wrote:

>I have a silly question.  Will Textmaker and Open/StarOffice be
>able to interchange docs in their native formats?  I'm a little
>behind so be nice, I haven't used StarOffice since 5.2 and I
>haven't tried Textmaker yet.  I just a little concerned that
>developers will try to lock users in by making their formats
>more complex while reading the other guy's format (not accusing
>anyone at all, just concerned).  Concerning using an Office
>suite across all Win/*nix platforms, I'm a ripe consumer for the
>picking right now, especially with the DRM stuff coming in the
>next MS Office.
>
>  
>
Perfecting MS Word import and export has been and is priority #1 for us. 
There is so much e-mail with .doc attachments sent back and forth that 
this is an absolute necessity. We also have support for RTF, HTML, 
ASCII, and Unicode plain-text, and we will in a future version offer an 
OpenOffice filter.

About vendor lock-in, I can understand your concerns. That's why we not 
only support our own native format but MS Word's .doc format as a 
parallel format. You can even set your default file format to .doc if 
you don't want to bother with our format. I'd wager there will always be 
(at least for the next 100 years...) a way to read .doc files -- not 
that I'm crazy about this format per se, but it IS the standard after 
all in the business world.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH