On 5/21/06, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Well, not really stupid, as we had people trying to upload Word documents but complicated. Word is a propietary format. Data is quite binary and there's no public specification. The format has more-or-less been reversed so prograsm as OpenOffice or AbiWord can work with it, but there're still issues, specially the embedded objects (images, equations...).
Oh, I wasn't thinking of trying to actually read Word documents, but simply using Word's macro language to generate Word content on the fly. So, you'd be in Wikipedia, and using Mozex or similar, extract the current page markup, and magically turn it into something that could be pasted into Word. After editing, a different macro would do the reverse - turn the Word content (disregarding anything not supported by MediaWiki) back into Wiki markup.
The major issue would obviously be achieving idempotency: towiki(toword(X)) = X. Otherwise, every time you went through the process, all the text on the page would risk being changed, causing spurious diffs etc...
Steve