From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Nov 26 2002 - 11:28:59 EST
Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <antonio at tuvalkin dot web dot pt> wrote:
> Hm. Is is OK to distributite documentation in such a proprieatry and
> virus-prone format when a safe and platform-independent equivalent
> (.rtf) is readily avaliable?...
In fact, the majority of WG2 documents seem to be distributed as PDF
files. I get the feeling Adobe is ambivalent about just how "open" they
want PDF to be -- they've published the spec, but increasingly refer to
it as "Adobe PDF" instead of just "PDF."
Microsoft Word is certainly a proprietary format, but isn't
"virus-prone" a bit of fear-mongering? Are there any Word users out
there who *don't* have macro virus checking turned on?
In theory RTF is more platform-independent than Word format, but in
practice I really don't know how many non-Windows systems are able to
read RTF. As a rich-text format implemented as "plain text plus tags,"
it seems to have been almost totally replaced by HTML. (Indeed, HTML is
probably the format I'd use to distribute such a document, if I didn't
have access to Distiller.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Nov 26 2002 - 12:13:14 EST