Translation Warning

The word processor used by upFront.eZine Publishing is Atlantis OceanMind from Rising Sun Solutions. I like it, because it is not a Microsoft product. It helps that I get free lifetime upgrades, because I was one of the earliest adopters of Atlantis.

(Company policy dictates we not use Microsoft products, unless there is no alternative. That means we use Opera for Web browsing, Eudora for email, OpenOffice for spreadsheets, Atlantis for word processing, but Windows 2000 as the operating system -- the last good operating system from Microsoft.)

Anyhow, Atlantis has a kool feature that (1) I just noticed yesterday; and (2) should be incorporated into CAD software. I was saving a document in .doc format, and accidently selected Word 6 format, instead of Word 97. Atlantis poped up a dialog box that (1) warned features would be lost in translation; and (2) listed the features. (Click the image at left to see the dialog box fullsize.)

Even if CAD vendors are too shy to list the problems in translating drawings to a competitor's format, they should warn which entities will be lost or changed or not displayed when translated into earlier versions of their own format.

This is not hard to do. Over the years, I've generated lists of entities that are modified/erased/hidden by translation; the CAD software's SaveAs compares the entities found in the drawing with the change list, and displays the appropriate warning.

The dialog box could also suggest ways to minimize problems, such as changing system variables or entity types before translation.

Comments

[Shaan Hurley]

I am curious. Why the anti-Microsoft rethoric in this blog all of a sudden? Windows 2000 "the last good operating system from Microsoft"? XP is a great operating system and I would never go back to 2000 personally.

Why set yourself up for a limited products, daisy chaining products together to make a office like solution, and many potential problems just to avoid a company that changed the PC software industry and has many of the best products in its markets.

Ralph you wrote a book on Visio but there are other alternatives to Visio, so do you use another diagraming software that is non-Microsoft?

Next some in the world will be proclaiming we will not purchase round rubber tires, they monopolized the tire indistry with this shape and material and the free concrete square alternative tires will be used. ;-)

I simply have a policy of using the best tool regardless of where it came from.

-Shaan