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Open document formats

Max M maxm at mxm.dk
Mon Jul 15 03:00:50 EDT 2002 
.doc is the most common file format there is outside of html/txt so 
naturally anybody who has customers that lives in an MS world must be 
able to read it. Which means most of us.

Publishing/reading in ps/pdf is rather easy for *nix types and 
Publishing/reading in .doc is easy for Windows types, so it is very much 
a matter of taste which format you use.

I use Open Office with only small problems for reading/writing .doc. 
Sometimes the pages are not formatted correctly but I can allways read 
the text. But the fact is that it is pretty painless with open/free 
software.

So I believe there is a good argument for publishing in .doc instead of 
.ps or .pdf, especially if the target audience is bussiness people.


But on the other hand if something is meant to be published on the net 
it is a very bad idea not to convert it to html.

I rarely bother to open something that my browser doesn't open natively 
  like txt/html. If I do it is allways a major work like an online book 
or somesuch, never a "single page" document.


regards Max M
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