Re: OT: Cross-platform document format?
"Ingles, Raymond" wrote:
>
> > From: Kent West [mailto:westk@nicanor.acu.edu]
>
> > > LaTeX or Lout (combined with say xfig or dia for graphics)
> > > may fit the bill,
>
> > Thanks for the response. I was looking for a common document
> > format, so that the students on campus would quit turning their
> > homework in as .DOC format.
>
> RTF is open enough. I know that WP and OpenOffice and the rest can
> read it, and there's a native-RTF editor for Linux, too. Plus, Word
> can be convinced to save as RTF, though of course it hates being
> prevented from tripling the file size with binary DOC stuff.
Yeah, RTF looks like the closest to what I'm looking for.
> RTF doesn't support every possible format option, but it should cover
> 90% of the stuff you'd run into on campus. It doesn't support viruses
> to my knowledge.
Yeah, I experimented some the other day; plain stuff does okay, but the
more complex docs really turn ugly fast. (BTW, I exported a complex WP9
doc to RTF, which neither Word nor WordPerfect would even recognize as
being a valid file format; WP used to be SO excellent). I need better
than 90% support, which means RTF really doesn't do the job. However,
I'll still probably recommend to the faculty that they encourage the use
of RTF over DOC.
I guess there's no such animal. It looks like Phil Brutsche got it right
when he said "If you *do* need to pass around documents for editing,
then MS Word's .doc is your one and only choice."
Major bummer.
> Well, except for the fact that if you rename a .doc file to .rtf,
> Word will open it and edit it like a DOC file, including running macros.
> So even if it looks like an RTF file, it might not be. Still, it's
> better than nothing...
I didn't know this. This is very good to know.
> Sincerely,
>
> Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com
Thanks!
Kent
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