I do believe that, if you want to do initial document
preparation in Word, you should be able to do that. As others
have suggested, no one I know of is really interested in
standardizing on or requiring a particular editor. But, to do
so, you need to be able to produce an editable format that is no
worse than ASCII. You may have better ideas, but, as I have
explored that range of options, I've come to the conclusion that
there ought to be two ways to accomplish that end. They are:
(1) Development of an "IETF printer driver" that can be
distributed as freeware or with minimal costs and
restrictions and that would produce lines and pages of
the right layouts _and_ would handle "smart character"
to ASCII conversions, generation of appropriate
line-ending sequences, etc. Whomever developed this
thing would need to make a long-term commitment to
producing and maintaining versions for every version of
Windows from, I think, Win98 through the indefinite
future. The generic printer and the conventions of RFC
3285 are demonstrably not good enough.
A completely correct observation:
Since the draft-stage of RFC 3285, I have been using MS-Word
as editing tool, and appreciated the WYSIWYG and tracking
advantages of it. However, since the output of the M$ generic
printer driver has changed for *EACH* version of Windows,
I have had to update the parser each time I wanted to support
a new Windows variant, I now have one parser for NT4, one for
98, one for 2000, one for XP, and I even had to improve the
XP version to work properly with Office 2003 under 2000.
This could be done, and it only affected me who decided to
still use Word as my editing tool. I still believe Word may
be a proper choice for draft editors, but they should be
aware of the problems, and Word is for sure not a proper
format for publishing documents.
/L-E
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