GDI metafile saved from LibreOffice do DOC problem

I am having pretty strange problem. In order to maintain compactability with Microsoft Office, all my drawings are done in LO Draw and then pasted as GDI Metafile… then, when I save in DOC format, vector drawings are recognized in MS Word… However, this only works on Microsoft Word under Windows.

My collegue uses Microsoft Office under MacOS, and he cannot see my drawings inserted as GDI metafile.

What could be source of this problem?

Hi Ljijan, have you trying to verify if creating a .doc with a GDI using MS in windows works fine in Mac?

This is a good point. I have Word Mac 2011 and it treats files from other versions of Word with all manner of differences. There is an assumption that all Word versions are identical, but they are not.

I remembered have seen some related issues in any place. Who knows, maybe is more compatible with MS, LibreOffice than MS? :slight_smile:

Yes, possibly. I think GDI metafile is a LO substitute for WMF/EMF. It may be related to that difference, but I think testing this would require hacking a DOCX (generated by LO) to substitute a WMF/EMF in place of the GDI metafile and then test the versions under Word and Writer. I would not even attempt do this with a DOC.

Ok, I will test that but it will take some time :slight_smile: probably next Wednesday or Thursday… what I have discovered also… in MS Word Viewer under Ubuntu 13.10 (installed by Play on Linux with WINE), drawings are not shown (just picture frame is shown)… Google Drive, however, does display some elements of drawings such as text and bitmaps (if they were used in combination with other vector drawings)…

Another point, I analyzed orignial .ODT file (renamed it to zip) and pictures are stored as SVM files (StarView Metafiles)… I tried to used WMF or EMF then… and LibreOffice cannot handle it well (exporting to PDF does not create nice final documents, as well as memory issues - it is slow)…

@Ljiljan, refer my long and detailed post here about Starview / GDI metafiles and how they are used in OLE. The general application is similar. OLE and the various related metafiles are a terrible technology for LO to be implementing. This is one area where a workable alternative to Microsoft sponsored standards are sorely needed. We need to support linked SVGs with ODF package-to-package embedding or something similar.