“Sadly, I don’t think anybody is going to be developing filters
to import HancomWord files, because I don’t think anybody is going
to stick with HancomWord long enough to produce any files. The
reason is, the thing is monstrously ugly. By that I mean it
actually hurts the eyes to look at it. Because it is a WINE port
(or perhaps because of the way it was ported), the thing’s
furniture — titlebar, toolbar icons, menu items — shrink to
tininess at 1024×768 or above. Okay, so do many of the same
elements in, say, StarOffice. But with HamcomWord there’s more: the
screen fonts are the worst I’ve ever seen, and in Linux that’s
saying something. (The late, largely forgotten Maxwell somehow
mastered putting letters and numbers on the screen, but its
developers didn’t master much else, including survival of their
application. I do wish that someone would look at their code and
see how they did it, though.)”
“Still, if one stayed at 800×600 and had no other choice,
HancomWord would probably do. It doesn’t seem to devour enormous
resources and it is neither breathtakingly fast nor terribly slow.
It works, it has a decent feature set, and one wishes it were Linux
native from the get-go. But I’m really beginning to wish that
people would forget WINE as an expedient toward porting Windows
applications to Linux. In the OS/2 world there used to be
Micrografx Mirrors which served much the same purpose with exactly
the same effect: the production of bad semi-native applications.
(Weirdly, it also brings along a qt-1.x library.)”
“I had hoped to delight you with screenshots of this case study
in what an application should not look like, but before I really
had the opportunity I discovered the utterly disqualifying feature
of HancomOffice: it violates the prime directive. It breaks stuff.
KDE, for instance.”