On Apr 19, 2011, at 4:09 PM, RA Brown wrote:
Stephen Throop wrote:
--
Thank you, Andy! How about TXT? At a glance, it seems reliable.
Plain text is the lowest common form. There is no formatting or
graphics so should work across the board.
I thought RTF was almost as simple. That's why I didn't expect
trouble with OO.
I'm interested not only in a universal format for email but in making
archives I can open in fifteen years if I don't have OO. (I've had
a bad
experience in the past.)
This is why the ODF formats were created. The total file is an
archive created using ZIP. The contents of the archive as text
files, with XML tags so that a program like OOo can display it with
formatting and graphics. Now the graphics, a binary file, are
stored in a standard format that most graphic programs can display.
Wow! I used Stuffit Expander to make a folder of an ODT document.
Now I see why it takes so long to open or save with OO.
I don't know much about DOC. I've read that it was originally like
TXT,
but MS expanded it. If OO can save things like columns and
footnotes in
DOC, that sounds like my best bet for archives.
DOC and RTF ar both MS owned closed formats. OOo and LibO have
what limited conversion they have from reverse engineering files.
It is not and can not 100% compatible. Someone at MS leaked the
format for DOC but anyone making a 100% compatible program would be
sued. MS forces incompatibility to create vendor lock-in. Do a
web search for ODF vs DOC and read up on some of the background for
ODF.
I believe I've read that Wordperfect brought out DOC. Then MS
changed it.
Years ago, I created thousands of documents with MS Word 5. When I
got a new Mac, I discovered I couldn't access them. It took years to
discover that I could open them if they were on a disk with Apple's
old formating. I've never heard of any other app whose files
couldn't be opened unless stored on a disk with certain formating.
On my new computer (several years old), Word 5 won't print, and I
don't have a printer that works with my old computer. For most of my
Word 5 documents, saving as RTF made them accessible to more modern
apps, but it doesn't work very well for papers with images and
footnotes.
With open source ODF, maybe I'm not running the risk I ran with MS
Word. Thanks, Andy.
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