On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> Hi Dvir,
>
> I respect MR. Stallman opinion, but I still say he's lunatic and I really
> don't care how much flames I'll get. I'm looking at the real world here in
> Israel for example - I'm unmployeed and whenever I'm trying to send my CV as
> a text, HTML or PDF I get shouts from the HR department that my CV is
> "unreadable" or "unprintable" - when I send then Word 97 document - they're
> happy...
What about RTF?
It generally takes more place (due to a very inefficient encoding of
hebrew. Something in the lines of quoted-printable) but it is readable by
any decent word processor (word95/7/0/xp, qtext, etc.)
In fact, maybe you can simply take an RTF document, give it a .doc
extension, and feed it to word as a word document (this is roughly what
word200's "hebrew word97/95" export filter does)
Arguments that can be raised against using MS-Word:
1. non-standard
2. too-powerful: may carry macro virii
3. bloated: takes too much space
Other alternatives:
Text:
Probably the most standard. Anybody with a certain degree of hebrew
support in the OS can read a ISO-8850-8-i/CP1255 hebrew text file. It
also has the advantage of having a minimal space consumption.
Problems:
* Bad at saving formatting (although not as bad as people think).
Export routines of word processors can preserve paragraphs,
numbering and bullts. But probably cannot preserve *emphasys*
* Not always trivial to use text from there (espcially if it has
complex formatting)
HTML:
Text with some formatting. When used efficiently can produce
relatively compact text files. Can preserve at least most of the
formatting (at least the important bits).
Problems:
* Word2000's HTML export tends to be quite bloated (but not as the
original document, I believe)
* When explorer is used to read HTML files, they are not safe of
ms-integration-virii
* Not always trivial to use text from there (espcially if it has
complex formatting)
PDF:
A read-only text format that preserves almost all of the formatting.
Can be made quite compact.
Problems:
* A read-only format (Spare me the notes that it is not exactly true).
Although for some uses it is an advantage
* A viewer for that format is not common enough.
* Most windows users don't have the software to produce a compact
hebrew PDF document.
PostScript:
Genrally the same advantages and disadvantages of PDF. The viewer is
even less common, and the format is a bit less rich (e.g: URLs)
RTF:
This basically preserves the formatting, and allows further editing.
Problems: size is bloated. I'm not sure about virii.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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