Hi, Frank

From: Frank Shute <shute@esperance.demon.co.uk> To: Edgehill E-Mail Service <EdgehillIT@edgecoll.clara.net> Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] OSE Development Meeting --- .DOC argument. Date: 12 September 2000 20:23

On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 05:45:14PM +0100, Edgehill E-Mail Service wrote:

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This thread is the stuff of Holy Wars. Surely we can agree on

something?

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I have to say, and it may be a daft comment, that in the "OLD DAYS"

<cue:

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violins etc.> the .DOC extension was just that - a document (formatted ASCII Text) rather than the .ASC or .TXT of unformatted text. I still occasionally forget...

But the problem is that it is not a format that is even standard across different versions of Word.

Agreed - even different language variants of the same version - but there ARE 'free' readers available.

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Word _is_ an excellent piece of software <cue: cash register. "Thanks, Bill.> for producing finished documents under Windows - *PROVIDED* that

you

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know that your reader has a suitable viewer or will be getting hard-copy. The fact that a vast number of users produce/read Word files as their main document format makes the .DOC format, like it or not, a de-facto standard - even if it is a proprietary one. The same goes (went) for Lotus files!

I don't think it is quite the de-facto standard that everybody likes to believe. Yes 90% of people use Windows but what percentage of that 90% have the /correct/ version of Word to read documents that are produced with another version of Word? What's for sure is that 100% of linux users such as myself can't deal with it and I'm damned if I'm going to buy software to read and write some `de-facto' standard that isn't really a standard anyway.

Also agreed - but many businesses use the dinosaur anyway - and at least the later versions will produce documents in other formats, although it wasn't allways thus.

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Agreed, if you want a cross-platform document, you use a cross-platform format (text, RTF(many systems will sort-of render it, at a pinch), PDF

or

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even HTML!)

ascii, PDF, HTML and TeX are all cross-platform. Everybody can deal with the first three, if not creating at least reading.

Exactly, but much (not all, happily) of the besuited business world denies the existence of anything not according to the default for their software :(

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Thankfully, for those of us who use Word OR recieve .DOC's, more and

more

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systems are now willing to view (if not write) the Word format files, which makes it easier for the Windows user to communicate (and later, migrate) to more open standards.

Rather than booing and shouting, please try to have a little sympathy with those of us who havn't managed to migrate yet. I am scheduling the changeover for (hopefully) the summer holiday 2001.

I don't mean to criticise those who do or have to use Word, what I'm getting at is it's essentially useless to me and a lot of others.

But, as a user of the behemoth in question, I have to say - it's the best of a bad (Windows)lot, and I accept that it is pretty useless to anyone not possessing a suitable piece of software - hence my comments about ASCII, PDF etc. Sadly, we don't seem to be in the majority :(

I'm glad to hear that you're planning to migrate. I'd recommend you try and get into LaTeX. I believe that Lyx is fairly easy for beginners and as you get comfortable with that you can start perhaps marking up LaTeX directly using an editor such as Vim which is available for both Windows and Linux/unix

Once you familiarise yourself with the benefits of LaTeX you'll dump Word with the realisation of just how limiting and clumsy it is.

Surprisingly, it isn't *necessarily* terribly clumsy to an experienced user with 23 fingers and a full BuckRogers keyboard <wry grin>, but there again, I use keyboard commands for most things. I don't use the "full feature set" or anything like it, after all - and nor does anyone else I know, and that is the main problem - rampant featuritis. I really would like to be able to afford the time (right now) to use something else - but we are an educational establishment, after all, and our 300+ young users need something at least vaguely familiar to start with. Sadly, this currently means Word, but we have started introducing StarOffice as part of the run-up toward migration to Linux - this is in order to maintain compatability between current work files (Word 7, Excel etc), their home computers (Office, Works etc, occasionally Linux systems!) and our future plans. Again, hardly an ideal solution, but it appears to be working. <crosses fingers and grabs a lump of wood> Once we have migrated fully, we will be in a position to think again about our primary teaching software. Most of my departmental/internal documents are being converted to HTML (for the ephemera, using the word converter directly from the .DOC, but that's just laziness on my part :/ )

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Incidentally, I can't read .DOC's from the machine I use for e-mails. I have to save to the network and open the file from the administration workstation!

Let's just agree that things need to change, and avoid .DOC attachments

:)

Here, here!

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regards, Paul