[Wolves] Kevan's MS Word alternative format question

[Andy Wootton]

Kevanf1 wrote:

>Huh, I came across that a couple of days ago.  I'm a committee member
>for our village appraisal (Cheslyn Hay).  We all have reports to write
>out concerning different aspects of village life - mine is policing in
>C/H :-))))  It seemed the whole room were in agreement that they would
>submit in M$ Word format.  Then I piped up :-)  I suggested saving in
>RTF so that anybody could read the document irrelevant of OS (I am
>correct in that assumption aren't I?)  They all looked at me as if I
>was a bloody Martian.  I carefully explained to them that M$ is not
>the be all and end all of OS's and that I use Linux most of the time. 
>I was careful this time not to mention WINE and M$ Office - which I
>don't use anyway preferring OOo.  Couldn't convinve them though.  Mine
>is being submitted in RTF and stuff them.  It will also have a footer
>stating that it has been created on a PC running OOo on Linux.
>
>;-)
>
Kevan,

I used Abiword for the first time recently to see why it is still chosen 
as the default WP by Gnome. It is so fast compared to OOo and will still 
run on a 486. However, I chose RTF as the output format and tested that 
it worked in OOo. No problem. I then sent it to a Wintel PC. Word 
couldn't cope with it. Wordpad showed it perfectly on screen but 
couldn't print it. Aren't standards a wonderfull thing?

I've had more success using OOo and saving in MS Word .doc format. I 
just have to be a bit careful about what fonts I use but I could 
probably sort that out with a bit of effort.

Have you considered using PDFs for final documents? If you want to scare 
the MS fans, dig out the story about when the edit history of a Labour 
Government document was extracted from the hiden information in a Word file.

HTML is another possibility then you could publish on the community web 
site.

http://website.lineone.net/~web_presence/FRAMES.HTM

Woo