On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 "John P. Tomany" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Besides - by now you must have heard about
> Microsoft's "confession" about Word: every document created inside
> Word has the registered owner's unique information included inside
> the header. This is so that Microsoft can track usage; it serves
> no other purpose.
>
A few weeks ago I received a mail from a friend containing a Word-
document. As I'm still using my DOS-machine for e-mail, I thought it
was too much trouble to copy the mail to a floppy to transfer it to
my Win95-machine which has Word ver. 7. So I tried reading it as it
was. It appeared to contain only about 20 lines or so of meaningful
text, but still occupied ab. 30 k space. I looked through the rest
and at several places I noted the name of my friend followed by a
long number... So this was the "secret" id-number?
> On the other side of the "customer service" question: What sort of
> service do I provide to my customers if everything I give them
> requires a download of some oddball document reader, useable on
> only a few versions of operating system ?
Well, even though the different versions of MS-Word now seems to be
the all-dominant word-processing software, developing into something
of a de-facto standard, there are still others, like WordPerfect. It
would of course be equally stupid to send someone a mail formatted
with WP, if you didn't know that the recipient had the same program,
or some other which could convert from WP.
> There is only one format which EVERYONE can read: plain ASCII text.
> And yes, even MSWORD can save the documents in PLAIN TEXT !
> ( There may come a day when HTML is as common - but not today.)
What kind of formatting do you prefer if you want to transfer a
document with at least some of its original formatting preserved?
HTML, like my fellow countryman Bernie?
And what about PDF? This is becoming increasingly common. Many
official documents here in Sweden, which you can find on the Web, are
only accessible in PDF-format, and I noticed e.g. when I visited
Dolby Labs home-page - being a projectionist I am interested in the
latest developments in cinema sound - that some documents which
before were available as plain text or html, now only were available
as PDF-documents.
I see this as somewhat of a parallell to the Word Viewer. You must
have a proprietary "oddball document reader" from Adobe, however
free, to read those documents, and this reader is not available for
all operating systems. The reader for DOS, e.g., is supposedly too
old to be able to read newer pdf-documents.
Shouldn't Adobe be bashed for this, too?
Lars-Einar Jansson
Stockholm, Sweden
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