On 30 Jan 03 at 23:10, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Their business goal is ownership of the market and ongoing wealth, >not greatest possible convenience to customers. ... >Unhappily, if you *must* exchange documents with those using >MS Word, then your choices are 1) have a copy of MS word around >for that traffic, or 2) do all your exchanges in RTF. There may >eventually be 3) use WordPerfect/StarOffice/AbiWord/other but >we're not there yet.
In many countries of Eastern Europes computer training courses tell people not to use accented letters in e-mail, because they cannot be sure that it will be readable. This is generally true, if they use e- mail accounts at hotmail.com or similar, but it is actually desinformation in reagard to current IP and mail client software. Instead, according to general opinion, you should send only .doc or .rtf. The result is that 90% of internet mail traffic in Czech republic contains .doc attachments (from quite a number of different versions and encodings). Only in less than 10 percent of these cases is there any formatting information (bold, italique, underlined) you may need. That means: * converting .doc ->. txt and .rtf -> .txt is a must. IMO this should be done by catdoc or antiword, one of which should be included in the basic distribution packet of BL. Both programs are maintained and try to keep up with the latest MS counter-compatibility measures. * if you need formatting information or further editing of a received document you may try to convince the sender to send you .rtf, because only in that case 100% compatibility can be attained. * I wonder whether a good way do *display* formatted texts would be .html format. But a suitable rtf -> html convertor should actually support Latin2 or other charsets. * Ted obviously is the right tool to *edit* and write .rtf. A public campaign for the use of rtf format on the internet could help increasing the number of .rtf attachments a bit. Regards Christof Lange _______________________________________________ Christof Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic phone: (+420) 222 78 06 73 / 222 78 20 02 http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
