"Ingles, Raymond" wrote: > > > From: Kent West [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > LaTeX or Lout (combined with say xfig or dia for graphics) > > > may fit the bill, > > > Thanks for the response. I was looking for a common document > > format, so that the students on campus would quit turning their > > homework in as .DOC format. > > RTF is open enough. I know that WP and OpenOffice and the rest can > read it, and there's a native-RTF editor for Linux, too. Plus, Word > can be convinced to save as RTF, though of course it hates being > prevented from tripling the file size with binary DOC stuff.
Yeah, RTF looks like the closest to what I'm looking for. > RTF doesn't support every possible format option, but it should cover > 90% of the stuff you'd run into on campus. It doesn't support viruses > to my knowledge. Yeah, I experimented some the other day; plain stuff does okay, but the more complex docs really turn ugly fast. (BTW, I exported a complex WP9 doc to RTF, which neither Word nor WordPerfect would even recognize as being a valid file format; WP used to be SO excellent). I need better than 90% support, which means RTF really doesn't do the job. However, I'll still probably recommend to the faculty that they encourage the use of RTF over DOC. I guess there's no such animal. It looks like Phil Brutsche got it right when he said "If you *do* need to pass around documents for editing, then MS Word's .doc is your one and only choice." Major bummer. > Well, except for the fact that if you rename a .doc file to .rtf, > Word will open it and edit it like a DOC file, including running macros. > So even if it looks like an RTF file, it might not be. Still, it's > better than nothing... I didn't know this. This is very good to know. > Sincerely, > > Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thanks! Kent
