Hi Terri,

On 15 Jan 2005 at 22:44, Terri Pannett spoke, thus:

> Well, I definitely DON'T recommend using ASCII text as the default setting.
> The disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

For a typical Windows PC user with a BrailleNote, you may well be right.  
However, as soon as your documents leave you, you have got to consider 
what other users have.

> If a person simply wants to be able to read a file using either the PC
> or the BN, why not use rtf, Word, or even WP5.1?  Everything you would
> need in a print file would be preserved.  But you still can't use place
> markers in these files. 

At this point, the advantages are only evident in file size.  It's not 
true that you can't do formatting in ASCII text, it's just that 
BrailleNote or other word processors like Word simply don't emulate it by 
default.  Word can be made, however, to do its best if you select "Text 
with layout" from the Save box - this uses underscores, strikeout/bold, 
wordwrap, etc and the files are still universal.  For my notetaking needs, 
ASCII is perfect.  It requires no unnecessary bloat and caters for the non-
formatting requirements that I expect to see in a notetaker.  It's also 
not necessary to do any conversion when it's copied directly from storage. 
 I rarely use the advanced wordprocessing features.

The place markers are features of KeyWord files, which is PulseData's 
proprietary format.  They don't exist in Word6/95/97/2000/XP/2003 files, 
at least not with that form, and most other formats.  In my opinion PDI 
should consider opening up this format so that applications can read and 
process them, such as OpenOffice.org suite or an MSWord filter (or even a 
standalone program).  K1000 is able to use filters on the system, as does 
Word and even WordPad - by developing one for kwt, this problem would go 
away and all apps could use them.  Even so, when converting the files on 
the BrailleNote is already trivial, is there much point?

Cheers,
Sabahattin

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Sabahattin Gucukoglu
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