To Do
There are a few features of Pocket Word which are not handled by the
converter. Some of them relate to features of Pocket Word and some
relate to StarOffice features which have no mapping in the Pocket Word
application.
Fonts
The most significant missing feature is the use of fonts. Files
generated by Pocket Word store data about each on-screen line in a paragraph.
This data consists of the number of characters and the screen space
occupied by those characters. Calculating this from a Java based environment
is no easy task.
Initial attempts to make use of the
java.awt.FontMetrics
class were unsuccessful as the values returned do not correspond to values
returned with similar calls on a Pocket PC device.
Tests with the ActiveSync supplied MS Word -> Pocket Word converter
show that there is some method of bypassing the requirement for these
line descriptors. That method, however, is not known.
Finally, while Pocket Word supports TrueType/OpenType fonts, it has
only 4 default fonts. As a compensatory measure the plugin could
make use of the
style.xml
file within a Writer document to substitute
similar fonts, e.g.
Courier New for monospace fonts,
Arial/Helvetica
for sans serif fonts and
Times New Roman for serif fonts. By
making use of the TrueType fonts distributed with the Java environment,
cross-platform availability is assured.
Other Features
Support for a number of other features could be added. These
include:
- Tables
- Images
- Page margins
Building the plugin
The Pocket Word plugin is built as part of the XMerge framework. Its
classes are stored in
pocketword.jar
. See
Building XMerge for more instructions.