[LINK] RTF / MS WORD / PDF / ?

[Howard Lowndes]

On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 11:11, David Lochrin wrote:
>    I've acquired the job of producing a monthly newsletter which is
> distributed partly by post and partly by email.  The email
> distribution has been in MS WORD format until now, but I'm considering
> changing to something which is more widely supported.  
> 
>    PDF is an obvious candidate, since a free reader is available for
> all platforms and it seems to have become the de-facto standard for
> interchange of documents on the web.  But a friend working in distance
> education comments "pdf is often a problem.  Whatever Acrobat wants
> you to believe the truth is that, even if  you supply the url of the
> download site, when novices are presented with the questions asked on
> said site they often say 'too hard'.  And the pdf file can take ages
> to open.  I suggest rtf to academics provided the files don't have
> japanese or other characters and provided there are no mathematical
> expressions.".
> 
>    My general understanding was that RTF is not functional enough and
> could not, for example, reproduce complex tables.  However the last
> issue of the newsletter seems identical in RTF & WORD.  The file size
> is 87 Kbytes instead of 73 Kb, but that's not an issue and it's still
> half the the size of the PDF proof copy I received from the printers
> (172 Kb).  I see RTF even handles embedded photos.

You do need to be sure that you can read the RTF file on a number of
word processors, not just the one you created it on.  I have been caught
out like this by creating RTF in StarOffice which didn't render how I
wanted it when read in M$ Word.

> 
>    RTF has the great advantage that it's a public-domain standard
> (RFC 1896), so RTF readers are available for just about every platform
> and can't be made illegal by Microsoft-inspired leglislation on
> intellectual property.  Interestingly, the RFC includes an addendum
> which lists a simple 'C' program for converting RTF to HTML V2.
> 
>    I'd really appreciate any comments on suitable file-formats for
> general distribution of such material.  (And please excuse this
> long-winded post!)
> 
> ADL
> 
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-- 
Howard.
LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people
<http://www.lannetlinux.com>
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