Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <antonio at tuvalkin dot web dot pt> wrote:
> Hm. Is is OK to distributite documentation in such a proprieatry and > virus-prone format when a safe and platform-independent equivalent > (.rtf) is readily avaliable?... In fact, the majority of WG2 documents seem to be distributed as PDF files. I get the feeling Adobe is ambivalent about just how "open" they want PDF to be -- they've published the spec, but increasingly refer to it as "Adobe PDF" instead of just "PDF." Microsoft Word is certainly a proprietary format, but isn't "virus-prone" a bit of fear-mongering? Are there any Word users out there who *don't* have macro virus checking turned on? In theory RTF is more platform-independent than Word format, but in practice I really don't know how many non-Windows systems are able to read RTF. As a rich-text format implemented as "plain text plus tags," it seems to have been almost totally replaced by HTML. (Indeed, HTML is probably the format I'd use to distribute such a document, if I didn't have access to Distiller.) -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
