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iainbrighton / PScribo

PowerShell documentation framework
MIT License
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Error when opening .docx files with LibreOffice #99

Closed Tragen closed 4 years ago

Tragen commented 4 years ago

When I create a document in Word format and I open it with LibreOffice, I get this error. image

I can ignore it and the document looks okay. It doesn't matter which document I create, I used the examples to test it.

iainbrighton commented 4 years ago

@Tragen thanks for reporting. I'll need to take a look at this and try and work out what's going on. Obviously, Microsoft Word is a lot more tolerant of the underlying XML. I doubt it'll be an easy fix and require a lot of reverse engineering.

Tragen commented 4 years ago

I minimized the example to

Document 'LibreOffice Error' { $services = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Service | Select-Object -Property DisplayName, State, StartMode | Sort-Object -Property DisplayName $services | Table -Columns DisplayName,State,StartMode -Headers 'Display Name','Status','Startup Type' -Width 0 } | Export-Document -Path $PSScriptRoot -Format Word -Verbose

When I press no to not load the document, I get this message

image

You can edit the document.xml and reformat the xml with linebreaks to get the correct location easier

iainbrighton commented 4 years ago

@Tragen I've managed to get to the bottom of what is going on. Ultimately, LibreOffice doesn't support autofitting the table cell contents and the underlying document.xml file has to define non-zero column widths. As a result, the code in PR #101 sets the width to 100% - Word will still automatically adjust the table width to fit the contents but results in a full-width table in Writer.

There are a couple of other "gotchas" that I've discovered with LibreOffice Writer whilst running through the examples:

  1. Doesn't apply custom row or cell font styles correctly (see \Examples\Example26.ps1)
  2. Doesn't dynamically update the TOC, resulting in a blank TOC (see \Examples\Example09.ps1)

Whilst these issues can probably be addressed, I'm not sure how much time/effort should be put into LibreOffice compatibility as it only appears to support the older 2006 Open Office XML specification. I've not heard of anyone else using LibreOffice to open PScribo documents, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts/use case.