User Feedback :: Fix for wordview xls2html and pptview
Roberts -
I totally understand your point of view and wouldn't want you to take time to edit DSL to accomodate the spaces in the filenames.
To me, in the case of these three scripts it's a necessary evil. You wouldn't even need these scripts if you weren't receiving a file from someone using M$ Office (Or I guess OpenOffice or Abiword) so you will receive the files in the formats that M$ supports. My vote is that we let it slide here but any other instances require tying up the offending individual and throwing them overboard! AAARRRRR!!!!!
Chris
Heres me being my libra self... I see Roberts point and I see Clivesay's... Unix doesn't support spaces... but these are utilities that let you see stuff that isn't from 'nix. How about adding in something that says "Take out the spaces you windows n00b" or something 
My opinion is this:
Rewriting everything in the distro to accept filenames with spaces is counterproductive.
However, in this situation we are dealing with a problem caused by "helpful" Microsoft tools. For example, If I create a MSWord document with the first line of the document being a title like "How to Fish" and then push the Save button, MSOffice will automatically save the file as "How to Fish.doc". This is why spaces are so prevalent in these documents. I imagine that this is also true for XLS and PPT docs but I am not sure.
Since the purpose of these scripts is to view/convert Microsoft Office docuements, I think that it is reasonable for them to handle the filenames with spaces because otherwise a large percentage of the documents that are fed into the script will fail the script.
To give a similar example, recently a topic was discussed about how to use emelfm / scripts to transcode an *.mp3 file into a new file with a different bitrate. Some nice ideas were proposed on how to accomplish this. One of my suggestions was to make sure that the script can handle filenames with spaces. Why? Because many audio CD to mp3 ripper programs will automatically tag the mp3 filename with the songname that is pulled down from an Internet database and these song names contain spaces in them.
So I think that it is appropriate in this case, but let it not become a slippery slope for the rest of the distro. This is a linux distro, not a windows os, so we have to draw the line somewhere.
FYI, if you want a chuckle, read up on some of the problems that win32 developers have. Many of their programs ALSO have problems with spaces for the very same reason but they have no choice if they wish to use it as their target platform.
OK. Because these three scripts are made to view/convert MS style documents, I will accept the space mods.
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