> > BTW: What value is there in ".docx" files vs .doc files? or even vs > .rtf files? I've never seen one. I'd be curious to know. Pages '09 > reads .DOCX files too, how they differ from .DOC files and what > advantage they pose seems invisible.
To the non-technical end user it doesn't really matter other than that .doc is the most proprietary of the formats. The others are an attempt to open up document formats to make them easier to share. docx is an xml format whereas the others are (I think) binary. xml is a notation used for structuring texts. Doc is proprietary to MS, as indeed is docx, but it's open and the dtd (a machine-readable technical document that describes types of xml text) is published somewhere so that xml processors should theoretically be able to deal with it and published changes relatively easily. xml itself is a mess, but that's a different story. rtf is not proprietary. For the type of word processing that I do - keeping things simple based on long-standing document design principles and avoiding all the crap - it's perfectly adequate. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
