On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 09:37:41AM -0500, Steve Crocker wrote:
The issue of diagrams is entangled in the long-standing discussion of
proprietary formats. There is a huge benefit in having a format that
*everyone* can access without difficulty or cost. I can't begin to
tell you the impact I felt when I walked into a university half way
around the world in an underdeveloped country and had a graduate
student show me some pretty sophisticated stuff he had done based on
RFCs he had downloaded from the net. ASCII is an enormous advantage
from that respect.
What I find strange about this, though, is the reluctance to adopt
PDF. It's a well-known open standard. There are plenty of free
software interpreters and writers around, and Ghostscript passed the
threshold for good output 2 or 3 versions ago. I understand the
difficulty of machine parsing, but wouldn't an XML format with human
oriented output in PDF be nice? (I suppose I'm asking whether
there's some historical flamewar over this that I managed never to
look at, in which case I'll just keep my mouth shut.)
Of course, even if that was solved, the features of Word that other
like are not really available in most of the XML tools, AFAIK.
A
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