Word 6 postings on ACCC online

Tony Barry tony@ningaui.anu.edu.au
Fri, 6 Jun 1997 17:18:25 +1000


At 11:16 AM 6/6/97, Rachel Polanskis wrote:
>Here, I would like to stress, that as a UNIX user, the proprietry
>MicroSoft Word 6.x format is unusable on my system,

As a Mac user I can read Word 6 but I will NOT use Word 6 software beacuse
of its terrible security faults.  Word 6 Macro viruses are cross platform
and affect both Mac's and windoze.  Microsoft has been good enough to
provie a utility to convert word 6 to word 51. (on a Mac at least) so this
gets rid of the virus risk for me.


>In addition to providing a text/html version and a Word6 version
>I would like to suggest presenting the documents in PostScript,
>which is universally accepted by all systems and has a lower
>impact than PDF, and far more portability than Word.

Agree completely.

>
>Electronic publishing is about *accessibility* first and foremost.
>That is why we do it.  Encapsulating potentially useful
>or historically important information in a closed format
>is akin restricting public library access to people who have green eyes.

Here, here!  Open formats are needed.

Tony


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