I think it's fair to say that the less people know about computing the less 
they are likely to know about which formats are portable and which are 
not.  I had to use the utility "strings" to extract the text from a quite 
lengthy document for which my previous distro had no browser.

Then, with a couple of emacs macros I was able to format the resulting 
rivers of text and purge some unnecessary junk that remained.  It was not 
something I'd want to repeat.

And, yes, it is only people I correspond with regularly who are likely to 
respond to requests for ".pdf" and even with them I tend to make it a 
mantra.  Obviously, that only works if you don't have to deal with many 
other correspondents.  Even the Theoretical Linguistics Community has 
abandoned their "LaTeX only" policy and included Windows and, as 
academic communities go, is pretty small and tight.

Malcolm Johnston.

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