I agree with your premises. Having been a CAD operator who, at times, had to send drawing files to others, I felt it was MY responsibility to find out what the other person could read, or at least provide him/her with a way to contact me if there were problems opening the file. This carried over to text and spreadsheet files, too, since with both drawing files and text - spreadsheet files even the version number could affect the person's ability to open the file.
I also agree that ANY write-to docx should be an add-on, and not part of the vanilla release. Craig Tyche On 01/02/2011 08:50 AM, James Wilde wrote: > Is anyone else getting the impression that this thread is polarising into US > v rest of world? > > We've seen several people say that they have to accept what their customers > provide and can't go back to the customer and say "can you provide this in > another format?". To me that's an attitude which I, rightly or wrongly, > associate with the US. In Europe we just fire away an email and get the file > back again in another format. > > And the other side of the coin, as others have said, outside the US more and > more governments and non-US corporations are going over to FLOSS, whereas in > the US, Microsoft is dominant. > > If this is the case, we're never going to reach concensus on this topic. > Personally I've already signed up on Larry's side. How about this for a > compromise: > > LibO comes with support to read docx (which it converts to ODT), but not to > write it. When someone tries to write it, a notice comes up saying in effect > that docx is a broken format which even MS doesn't think much of, and that > LibO, in the interests of free standards does not support it in vanilla mode. > However, click on this button and we'll save in doc format. One might even > provide two buttons (plus Cancel), Save as doc and Save as odt. > > But for the Americans and others who might want it, a downloadable module is > provided which will write to docx format. Then we turn the matter over to > the educators, communicators and marketers to educate, communicate with and > market to the North American continent. Then those who want it can get docx > compatibility, but they have to make an active choice and they're told it's > risky and why. > > //James -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
