On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 3:51 PM, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
http://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/RPC-Proposed-SoW-2013-final.doc
I know that I should not this, but... I am a bit surprised
(disappointed) in seeing a proprietary format used here. I am not
saying that you should not use the Office suite to write it, but you
could convert it to PDF (better, PDF/A) before publishing it.
Anyway, I use Linux, so I guess I will not be able to give my input about it.
Hmmn. Is there some reason you are unable to install OpenOffice? It
opens and displays the SoW including the redline just fine.
OK, I admit I was over-polemicizing (stretching the language a bit..)
To be honest, my experience with opening .doc files with OO is a mixed
bag: often the rendering is good enough, but sometimes, with fancy
documents, funny things happen.
I suppose she could have sent it out in OpenOffice's .odt format which
is nominally more open, but then the people who use MS Word (I hear
there are still a few of them) couldn't read it. There's no great way
to send around a redlined document and I'd say that Word formats are
currently the least bad. I presume you know that the more recent
.docx file format is ISO/IEC 29500
No I did not know that and I must say that I like it. I can imagine
that is quite complex, but at least it is open. A doubt remains:
which fundamental features were missing from odt (an ISO/IEC standard
too, as far as I know) to grant for the definition of a new complex
object like a document format? Anyway, I do not want to start a
discussion about this (which BTW is becoming a bit OT with respect to
the main thread).
, so that should make everyone
happy, modulo the detail that it's so complicated that in practice the
older nominally un-open .doc interoperates a lot more reliably.
R's,
John