Re: [Fwd: Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)]
* Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> [070211 19:07]:
> There are lots of reasons to dislike Word - for example, the excreble
> HTML it generates when people insist on using it to prepare web pages -
> but for run-of-the-mill document preparation in a corporate setting,
> it's a pretty good tool. Practicality sometimes trumps religion.
While you speak of "practicality", you appear to be penny-wise but
pound-foolish. The best reason to dislike Word is the experience and
expense of losing the "source code" of documents composed over a
period of years because of proprietary data format.
This happened to me, back at the turn of the century. For the
documents which were most important to me, I was able to recover the
text, but character-level formatting -- italic, boldface, smallcaps,
underline -- could not be recovered by automated means. It was
necessary to manually add all character-level formatting to the
recovered documents. Moreover, the amount of manual labour required
for recovery of the text (without formatting) precluded recovery of
many of the documents.
That experience led me to Emacs and to GNU/Linux.
May a pox be upon the implementors of proprietary data encoding
schemes! Fools they be, who knowingly entrust their fortune to such
evil men.
RLH
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