Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 94264
Imported MS Word equations are not legible and can't be edited
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:44:35 UTC
Equations imported from an Office 2007 Word document are so garbled there's no way you can read them. Furthermore, double-clicking on them to edit them generates a "general error" alert. Some fonts were missing (greek), but even on equations with only Times Roman font, there's a general problem of horizontal character placement. Both the "load" and "save" checkboxes for MathType <-> OO Math were checked in Tools/Options/Load-Save/Office.
Created attachment 56793 [details] screenshot
For comparison, the same equation in NeoOffice 2.2.5 is correctly displayed (screenshot). Greek is correctly displayed too which suggests OOo doesn't look for the Symbol font in the right place. However, the equations are not editable either in NeoOffice and double-clicking them generates a "General OLE error".
Created attachment 56798 [details] screenshot from NeoOffice 2.2.5
Created attachment 56802 [details] test document for equation rendering
The object is not a Microsoft Equation / Mathtype object. It is MathType 5.x from Design Science, Inc. Thus it cannot be converted to an OOo Math object and not be opened on a platform where Mathtype 5.x is not installed. On Windows and Linux the object is displayed correctly, I will have a look tomorrow on OOO 3.0 on our Mac.
There is at least something to be clarified here. I thought a MathType 5.0 object was able to be translated once you enabled the MathType <-> OOoMath translation. If MathType is completely different from MSOffice-MathType (and no support is planned for externally generated MathType objects) then I reckon this should be made explicit in the Help. Anyway the rendering is correct in NeoOffice (so maybe in OOo 2.x on which it is based) but bugged in OOo 3.0 for Mac. For completeness I give you below examples of a different rendering problem with greek symbols.
Created attachment 56820 [details] Greek symbols: screenshot of OOo 3.0 with different ways to create a formula
Created attachment 56821 [details] The OOo 3.0 .doc file that was used to generate the screenshot (the Symbol font is installed on my system)
MRU->SJ: the characters in the Metafile of the object in the attached doc are dislocated. This is only a problem on Mac. Win, Linux and Solaris builds are ok.