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Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1441062]

Thu, 09 October 2014 03:56

Eclipse User

Hi all, I am facing the exact same problem with this guy. But since there is no response to it, I re-post the problem again at here.

"I use the BIRT reporting tool to generate word reports for the company I work for.
The tool outputs an xml based word doc and up until now there has been no issues with our reports, until we started using Office 2013.
I am confident that this is not an issue with the tool as previous versions of it and the current version have worked fine with previous versions of word but we are now seeing issues with older and current versions of our reports in word 2013.

The same report viewed in office 2010 looks perfect but it 2013 random tables in the report start getting torn apart or go missing, there are formatting errors and text get overlapped from one line into another .
It differs from report to report where the errors occur but given the same report viewed on multiple devices running office 2013 the errors appear in the same place, so its not a completely random occurrence.

It is also not a view issue as I have printed the docs and printing from 2010 is fine, but 2013 still has a large amount of errors.
In some cases when printing 2013 takes information in one column from one cell and puts it into another cell above or below it, all other cells get populated correctly but this one column gets populated with the wrong information in each of the cells.
This is what has led me to believe that it must be an issue with word as the idea of skipping around an xml file to pick an element that is not in sequence points to an obvious flaw in its ability to render xml correctly.

Viewing the doc in its raw xml form it seems to have the correct tags.
My question is can someone point me somewhere where I could do a comparison of what xml tags are expected in 2010 vs 2013 and if there has been any change to the schema?
Or if someone has the knowledge; is this a known issue and is there a bug in 2013 that causes this?"

The Birt version I'm using is 2.5.1. Is there any known solution or explanation to it?

Re: Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1441487 is a reply to message #1441062]

Thu, 09 October 2014 16:10

Eclipse User

In BIRT 4.3+, DOCX is available for the newer Microsoft Office suites. If you must use the older version of BIRT, you might need to create a new emitter for it. You could look at the 4.3 source to see the DOCX emitter code.

Re: Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1441627 is a reply to message #1441487]

Thu, 09 October 2014 21:12

Eclipse User

Michael Williams wrote on Thu, 09 October 2014 20:10

In BIRT 4.3+, DOCX is available for the newer Microsoft Office suites. If you must use the older version of BIRT, you might need to create a new emitter for it. You could look at the 4.3 source to see the DOCX emitter code.

Thanks for the response. However, I need to use this older version of Birt. Is it possible if I edit the report template of BIRT so that the output generated fits just nice in Word 2013?

Re: Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1441638 is a reply to message #1441627]

Thu, 09 October 2014 21:38

Eclipse User

Unfortunately, I don't know that there will be anything you can do inside the report to get it to render properly. Your best bet would be to get the source code for 4.3, find the DOCX emitter and modify it to get it working in 2.5.1.

Re: Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1443621 is a reply to message #1441638]

Sun, 12 October 2014 22:09

Eclipse User

Michael Williams wrote on Fri, 10 October 2014 01:38

Unfortunately, I don't know that there will be anything you can do inside the report to get it to render properly. Your best bet would be to get the source code for 4.3, find the DOCX emitter and modify it to get it working in 2.5.1.

Thanks for the response again and sorry for the late reply. Ok, so now I'm going to need the new emitter but I'm not sure how to do it as I'm still new to Birt. I'll search around the forum. Thanks for helping.

[Updated on: Tue, 21 October 2014 22:10] by Moderator

Re: Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1449370 is a reply to message #1443621]

Tue, 21 October 2014 04:55

Eclipse User

Sorry for double posting but I need to clarify about the source code. Is there a .birt.report.engine.emitter.docx.jar in Birt 4.3 that I could use? Can I put it in Birt 2.5.1 after modifying it to make emitter work? Has it been done successfully before in other versions of Birt?

Re: Word 2013 can't render xml based docs correctly [message #1827986 is a reply to message #1441062]

Thu, 28 May 2020 06:25

Eclipse User

This is years old, but recently I stumbled across a similar problem.

The reason is just that Microsoft changed behavior with Word 2013.

See https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-2016-tables-appear-to-be-indented/42c7e4b1-7ba0-470b-90c5-12c1faaf8c4c

Converting the document in Word with File/Information/Compatibility/Convert can help.

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