[LINK] RTF / MS WORD / PDF / ?

[Tom Worthington]

At 6/9/2004 11:11 AM, David Lochrin wrote:
>...  I've acquired the job of producing a monthly newsletter which is 
>distributed partly by post and partly by email. ... MS WORD ... PDF ... rtf ...

I suggest a subset of HTML with minimal formatting, so it will render as 
plain text. To be more specific: XHTML Basic with CSS 1 & 2, and conforming 
to W3C WAG.

One of my ANU students is due to deliver open source software to generate 
such documents automatically from MS-Word templates, at Open Publish 2004 
in Sydney, 10:45am on Friday 30 July 
<http://www.openpublish.com.au/program.asp?myCategory=PresentationDetail&myPresID=166>.

For details of the format see "Universal Document Format?" in my web design 
lectures <http://www.tomw.net.au/2004/wd/index.html#udf>.

For the reasoning behind this see my ACS Case Studies for ANU students from 
the last three years at <http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/dm/>.

The problem is not so much a technical failing with Ms-Word, PDF or RTF, 
but that they give the document creator too little structure guide them. It 
is possible to produce small efficient MS WORD, PDF or rtf documents, but 
there isn't much to help the author to do that. By default available tools 
will produce bloated files.

XHTML Basic can be used to constrain document creation tools, and WAG to 
guide users, to a more efficient subset of HTML. The results can then be 
turned into plain text, MS WORD, PDF or rtf, if required using tools such 
as Open Office.Org.



Tom Worthington FACS tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
Visiting Fellow, Computer Science, Australian National University
Publications Director, Australian Computer Society