From Bernard.Pichon@obspm.fr  Tue May 23 19:22:33 2000
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Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 19:22:34 +0200
From: Bernard PICHON <Bernard.Pichon@obspm.fr>
Subject: Re: Use of Word to distribute documents
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| 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

We can use the .rtf ouput from Word (or WordPerfect) with no
(macro)virus.
This can be read by WordReader (free) or other products (e.g.
StarOffice),
    or by rtf2tex (??).
In my opinion .rtf (for editable documents) or .ps or .pdf 
   are acceptable, for short texts, I prefer  .txt (and not .htm).

Bernard PICHON