Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 19112
Question mark is always used for ANSI equivalents in RTF files
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:26:08 UTC
According to the MS RTF specification, each Unicode character in RTF should have its ANSI equivalent. This is necessary for compatibility with old applications which don't recognize Unicode RTF. However, in RTF files generated by OOo this ANSI equivalent is always replaced with a question mark. For example, a word of Russian text may look as follows: \u1055 ?\u1088 ?\u1086 ?\u1074 ?\u1077 ?\u1088 ?\u1082 ?\u1072 ? This means that any RTF file containing national characters (Cyrillic, Greek, accented Latin...) can be opened only in a Unicode-aware application. If we open such a file in any other application (like MS Word 6.0/95, Page Maker, Quark Xpress), all national characters will be simply lost. So I can't use RTF as a universal interchange format, which was possible with MS Word. Really, however, these question marks should be inserted only for characters which have no equivalent in any windows-125* codepage. If such an equivalent exists (for example, Cyrillic `a' has code 0xC0 in windows-1251, Greek alpha is 0xC1 in windows-1253 and so on), it should be used in RTF file. So the Russian word above should look as follows: \u1055\'cf\u1088\'f0\u1086\'ee\u1074\'e2\u1077\'e5\u1088\'f0\u1082\'ea\u1072\'e0 I understand that this is a feature rather than a bug, however, I think fixing it should be important for compatibility with other software.
cmc: Mine. I have already done something similiar to support exporting unicode to 8bit word 6/95 format, so I should be able to leverage my unicode character classification into equivalent windows codepage stuff to .rtf as well.
Accepted.
Now that I have issue 10538 implemented I should be about half way to having this support.
cmc->mmaher: This would be a nice feature, but its not critical. Would be great to get some code from volunteers to implement this (hint hint outside world)
I think this is enchance feature and not critical only for english speaking peoples, but this issue is BUG for us who speak and make documents and exchange ones! I'm russian OO user and I have many problem with that issue and related international troubles. I work on plant with ~100 PC and we have many partners and we having many troubles and this issue is one of these. Please don't ignore these issues: many peoples wait this. I taked 2 Vote. I vote - this is BUG (for me)! Please excuse me for my English. I'm usually write russian texts and I write they only in russian OpenOffice.org from Russian translation team. Thanks all.
In my oppinion that it is critical for all non-English linguages. I have many problems when I use OO.org RTF filter for document exchange. Range of software in which problems were occured is wery huge: MS Word, MS Wordpad, Quark Xpress, Corel Draw, AbiWord and so on... So it is critical bug, not a feature or whish!
mmaher->flr: Yours I think
reassigning to hbrinkm
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".