From helbig@man.ac.uk Mon Jun 5 22:58:28 2000 Received: from mailhost.rug.nl (mailhost.rug.nl [129.125.4.6]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id WAA10511 for ; Mon, 5 Jun 2000 22:58:28 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from helbig@man.ac.uk) Received: from gladia.astro.rug.nl (gladia.astro.rug.nl [129.125.6.17]) by mailhost.rug.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id WAA05149 for ; Mon, 5 Jun 2000 22:58:25 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 22:53:55 +0100 Message-Id: <00060522535489@man.ac.uk> From: helbig@man.ac.uk (Phillip Helbig) To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.1826) RE: Nara - use of WORD, WG5 N1384 X-VMS-To: SC22WG5@DKUUG.DK X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG > PDF is a commercial product produced by a specific company, namely Adobe. > Using PDF "forces" people to use the product of a specific company. > > But?? Adobe is politically correct and Microsoft is not?? The situation is not completely equivalent since viewers for PDF are available for free on all platforms. If someone wants to pay money to Adobe for the ability to produce PDF, that's their business. Note that Adobe itself distributes free viewers. This is different in the case of WORD where there are no viewers for all platforms which show one all there is to see, and where it is not possible to keep up to date since the WORD file specification is, probably intentionally, a moving target. Personally, I think everything should be done in LaTeX or, if you want to use something proprietory, VAXdocument. :-) > OK - WORD is ugly and awkward and is not readily available to those running > other systems, and yes, it's probably the wrong tool for the job. Right. Monopolies are OK if the product is good---just like benevolent dictatorships are probably the best form of government. :-) > If that is why WORD should not be used, say so, and forget the > "non-standard" (and "virus prone") arguments. There is no standard which allows viewers to be developed for all platforms, and people with PCs ARE worried about viruses (oh how well I do sleep with my VMS systems). > I'm not sure about the origins of RTF and HTML. I guess the "HTML Standard" > would be OK if there weren't so many HTML standards. Maybe RTF and plain > text are the only common ground, whether or not they are "standard." There are certainly HTML standards and tools to validate HTML. Again, it is principally Microsoft who push their own extensions who have lessened the acceptance of the standard. > As time goes on, I think you are going to want to be able to include > features that can't be expressed in plain text and maybe not in RTF either. > So you need to anticipate some kind of graphics interchange as well. It looks to me like PDF is the way to go, especially since it is not tied to the program used to produce it (I can produce it from LaTeX, for example, and the consumer doesn't have to know or care). > I don't own any Microsoft stock, and I have plenty of problems with the > idiosyncracies of their software. But I don't think it's necessary to invent > imaginary arguments against it. Fishy arguments don't strengthen the case > against it, they just weaken it. It wasn't I who raised the virus argument. Fortunately, I have no experience with this. I just hear about hundreds of billions of dollars being lost due to a few lines of visual basic written by a pissed-off Filipino---the sort of computing environment I would want to deal with.