Re: Debian/ubuntu/suse and the current traffic
Agreed. The problem is not unsolved, though docx files recently forced me to make manual modifications to my Open Office so as to be able to read them. Fortunately, I expect this problem will become rarer as formats become relatively standardised.
regards,
Darryl
On 28/11/2007, Terry Hancock <hancock@anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
Denton Andrews wrote:
> We are all using word processors, whether proprietary or not, if we are
> practicing law. We may also be using some forms of proprietary time keeping,
> administrative management, or other law office tool ( which usually works
> only on a Microsoft OS) But if you try to convert your office documents or
> try to talk to someone who only uses Word, or whatever, you must have the
> software on your OS to convert or communicate. Without some way to
> immediately convert or translate the document, you are going no where. The
> programmers of the world seem to be oblivious of this problem. I think that
> is because they are not word processor specific. They do not appreciate the
> communication problem we are facing.
It has been a couple of years since I have seen a DOC file that Open
Office Writer (v2) can't open. I still make a point of complaining about
the use of DOC files just for the principle of the thing (and because
people keep sending me 65 KB emails in order to express 10 lines of
plain text), but in practice, they are not that hard to deal with.
When I did see problems, it was with exotic documents like fill-in forms
and/or heavy use of application embedding -- which probably aren't even
compatible between different versions of MS Word, so you're going to
have those problems even with MS Office installations.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that OpenOffice.org is MORE
compatible with MS Word than MS Word is!
To me, it seems that the bulk of DOC files that are transmitted via
email contain nothing but plain text formatted as business letters,
which is a bizarre waste of bandwidth, regardless of what OS you are
using. In some cases it would've been less wasteful, not to mention more
precisely formatted, to render the document as a GIF or PNG image and
send a pixel-by-pixel representation!
My main complaint is that OOo still seems to take an eternity to start
despite all of the claimed speed improvements, and since I don't use it
for anything except reading DOC and ODF files, I don't usually leave it
open. I suspect this is true of MS Word, though, and I imagine this
isn't so much of an issue for people who use OOo Writer for most of
their word processing needs.
So is there *really* an unsolved problem here?
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock@AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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