On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 3:51 PM, John Levine <jo...@taugh.com> wrote: >> http://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/RPC-Proposed-SoW-2013-final.doc >> >>I know that I should not this, but... I am a bit surprised >>(disappointed) in seeing a proprietary format used here. I am not >>saying that you should not use the Office suite to write it, but you >>could convert it to PDF (better, PDF/A) before publishing it. >> >>Anyway, I use Linux, so I guess I will not be able to give my input about it. > > Hmmn. Is there some reason you are unable to install OpenOffice? It > opens and displays the SoW including the redline just fine.
OK, I admit I was over-polemicizing (stretching the language a bit..) To be honest, my experience with opening .doc files with OO is a mixed bag: often the rendering is good enough, but sometimes, with fancy documents, funny things happen. > > I suppose she could have sent it out in OpenOffice's .odt format which > is nominally more open, but then the people who use MS Word (I hear > there are still a few of them) couldn't read it. There's no great way > to send around a redlined document and I'd say that Word formats are > currently the least bad. I presume you know that the more recent > .docx file format is ISO/IEC 29500 No I did not know that and I must say that I like it. I can imagine that is quite complex, but at least it is open. A doubt remains: which fundamental features were missing from odt (an ISO/IEC standard too, as far as I know) to grant for the definition of a new complex object like a document format? Anyway, I do not want to start a discussion about this (which BTW is becoming a bit OT with respect to the main thread). >, so that should make everyone > happy, modulo the detail that it's so complicated that in practice the > older nominally un-open .doc interoperates a lot more reliably. > > R's, > John
