[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I assume you'd ask them what they wanted, and then send text or rtf or
> word, or an SO file (in that likely order).
This is some general comments about the above and some star
gazing...
I have read from M$'s site (yep not second hand, its there)
that RTF is in "maintainence mode". It will disappear. Now
where is M$ going in terms of interoperability with other WP
products? A clue is in their cod e when you export HTML from
a word doc - its full of XML embedded in HTML comments. In
fact tehre is often more XML than HTML. The XML specifies
para indentation, footers, headers, pagination etc so that
the HTML doc can be reread back into Word and `get back' its
original formatting.
So I predict that M$ will announce an XML based WP exchange
format and that will compete with whatever other XML based
exchange format Sun or Corell or the open source community
push.
> a> Star office is still relatively imature and their future
> a> development path / support is not clear IMO. SO is designed as a
> a> monolith - just what unix doesn't like or want.
...
> I think this is the killer issue. It uses too much memory.
...
> a> As the unix camp is not
> a> in control of it I expect it will get some major architectural mods or
> a> will go into decline (depending on source quality).
>
> Agreed. Though since it is being GPL-ed this month or next month, the
> Unix camp will be getting control.
Its a huge package. Open source developers aren't going to
take that code and turn it into `one tool for one job and
all tools fit together'. It will stay a megalith and as PC's
get even more mem and hard disk space the issue of it being
slow will become less of a prob.
Most users don't care for UNIX philosophy. They want
something like Word. (yeah yuk but thats life)
(I'm currently enlarging the size of a C: drive under a
Win95 emulator running on an SGI workstation so my work
colleuge here can get Office installed on it!)
> a> BTW - I use latex too and have submitted a number of documents to ISO
> a> in pdf generated from latex. As things are shaping, pdf is a better
> a> document delivery format than word (or postscript) as, in general,
> a> the documents seem to be very portable and print predicatably - all
> a> credit to Adobe for making this happen!
<complaing>
Very different experience here with PDF. I have a colleauge
(must get a dict on this Linux box) who sends stuff to me
with PDF and he is still trying to get the fonts right.
Views fine on is machine but my machine does not have the
fonts and his Word Perfect will not embed the fonts in the
PDF as they are licenced.
Views and prints shitty. Next I need to extract text from
the PDF to get that info up onto a web site. No luck -
strings a PDF and you can't get the text. Its compressed.
Can't cut and paste from screen either.
I can't use the marvellous psutils to repaginate it, resize
it, turn it to ASCII etc.
Why didn't Adobe just add gz compression, encryption and
string searching to the PS standard?
</complaining>
Mike
--
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Michael Lake
University of Technology, Sydney
Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: 02 9514 1724 Fx: 02
9514 1628
URL: http://www.science.uts.edu.au/~michael-lake/
Linux enthusiast, active caver and interested in anything
technical.
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