There have been several postings on the TMG (The Master Genealogist) forum which
have made reference to the fact that word files (*.doc) created by TMG, while
opening ok in MSWord, when opened in Open Office Writer show images compressed
to squares, sacrificing both aspect ratio and size. While it is possible to
correct this in Open Office Writer with a few clicks per image (restore original
image size, as I recall), when there are many images this becomes quite burdensome.

I have made some tests that show that it is a characteristic of TMG's output
that triggers this problem. A file including images developed in Word (or
converted through Word) opens correctly in Open Office Writer.

As a user I would like to encourage the transition to Open Office for two
reasons. While cost of the word processing program is not much of a factor for
me, it certainly is for some others - Open Office is free. But the primary
reason is that Word fails (aborts) if there are too many footnotes/endnotes in
the TMG-created report. This acts in opposition to a genealogist's objective to
clearly document the sources of information.

In conversation with Bob Velke [TMG developer] a short time ago he indicated
that this has been a Word problem for considerable time, and that Microsoft was
notified of it several Word versions ago and has failed to fix it. This suggests
that MS doesn't consider it much of a problem and we can't look forward to a fix
very soon, if ever. There is some question of the number of footnotes generated
which cause Word to fail; I know that it fails with 4208. But OOo Writer opens
these files ok.

As a consequence of these factors, I have encouraged Wholly Genes to look into
the problem to determine the cause of the incompatibility with Open Office
Writer and either develop some kind of accommodation in TMG's output or work
with the Open Office people to resolve the issue in Writer. I have been told
separately that there's a principle that if Word will open a file correctly then
OOo Writer should too. 

To avoid any confusion on the subject, the problem exists even with small files
generated by TMG; the large number of footnotes problem is only a reason I'd
like to migrate.

It was suggested that I provide a sample file with this submission, but I see no
provision for it.  Upon request I'll be happy to provide one, along with linked
image files which need to be in a specific directory to illustrate the problem.

Dick