From malcolm@brackley.nag.co.uk Tue May 23 18:17:39 2000 Received: from brackley.nag.co.uk ([62.232.54.10]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id SAA64514 for ; Tue, 23 May 2000 18:17:32 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from malcolm@brackley.nag.co.uk) Received: (from malcolm@localhost) by brackley.nag.co.uk (8.9.2/8.9.2) id RAA06872 for sc22wg5@dkuug.dk; Tue, 23 May 2000 17:17:16 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from malcolm) From: Malcolm Cohen Message-Id: <200005231617.RAA06872@brackley.nag.co.uk> Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.1801) Use of Word to distribute documents To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 17:17:16 +0100 (BST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lawrie Schonfelder said: >Everyone can read pdf, the reader is freely available, but you need >relatively expensive prorietry software that is not all that widely used >(relative to word) to create it. As far as I know 90+% of people who use PCs >or MACs are likely to use WORD. If you are using Linux or solaris then there >is the free downloadable star-office product that can read and write word >format documents perfectly well. This is also available for use on PCs if you >happen to prefer CORAL or LOTUS wordprocessing products. I take your points completely, but in my opinion these are outweighed by: (1) The "Word virus" issue [killer issue 1] (2) The "recovery of deleted text" issue [killer issue 2] plus the minor points of (3) New versions of Word create (by default) output files incompatible with all previous versions. I for one have no intention of buying Word 2000 when I already have Word 6. (4) I don't particularly want to install some huge great star-office product either. Particularly just to read something like an agenda which ought to have been distributed in plain text in the first place! Again, I don't want to have to go installing all this stuff again for Word 2001, Word 2002, etc. As for the document editing question, the issue here is whether we impose on everyone who wants to *read* the document the burden of Word format. Those creating simple documents (i.e. not standards etc.) won't particularly miss the all-singing all-dancing typesetting capabilities; and for the (few) project editors, the burden of producing pdf (or finding someone to convert PostScript to pdf for them) is not particularly great. Particularly since they'll want to do that anyway for the version that goes to ISO Secretariat. Cheers, -- ...........................Malcolm Cohen, NAG Ltd., Oxford, U.K. (malcolm@nag.co.uk)