Re: OT: Is .RTF an Open Standard?
On 26 Mar 2002, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 16:23, Kent West wrote:
>
> > Is there a true open standard format, that is easily
> > created/used/editted on any platform, other than text? (Text (ASCII? -
> > and what's the difference between DOS ASCII and Windows ASCII, and Text
> > ASCII, etc?) would be ideal, except for the inability to do such things
> > as bold, font color, etc).
>
> DOS and Windows ASCII are identical -- as ASCII only covers the lower
> 128 characters. There are differences in the upper 128 characters, which
> depend on the codepage being used in DOS and the character set in
> Windows. Microsoft make things even more fun by using a variant of the
> ISO standards for Windows.
>
> An open standard for documentation? (X)HTML is good if used correctly.
> DocBook is excellent for technical documentation, LaTeX/TeX for
> reports. There exist good WYSIWYG editors for these _if you pay money_
> :(, but Lyx/Klyx is a good WYSIWYG semi-LaTeX editor apparently.
Postscript is a good standard for distributing documents (not writing in
them). PDF is becoming a standard of sorts. I think it's proprietary, but
well defined and "open for use." Many good tools exist on most major OSes
to produce PDF.
You won't want to edit in postscript or PDF, but will want to produe it
from another format (e.g. Word, StarOffice, etc.).
--
Paul F. Pearson (ppearson@hiwaay.net) http://home.hiwaay.net/~ppearson/
"Lord heal our land. Father heal our land. Hear our cry and turn our nation
back to You" - Heal Our Land, _Magnify The Lord_ (Integrity Music)
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