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Alternatives To .DOC As Standard WP Format?
D. C. Sessions asks: "I'm on the Software Task Group of a standards body (JEDEC) which is, among other things, responsible for the DDR memory standard. You may have heard of it. Currently standards drafts must be submitted in an editable word processing format, which right now is interpreted as FrameMaker or MS Word. I find not only offensive, but dangerous that these standards -should- outlive the current MS software that can manipulate them. I've gotten some sympathy on 'bit rot' from the rest of the committee based on showing what current flavors of Word do to documents saved with older versions, but the problem is this: What do I propose as a replacement?" Two that come to mind right off of the top of my head are LaTeX and, of course, HTML. Any other formats that can work just as well as .DOC in most situations and are cross-platform to boot?
"It should (obviously) be an open file format, preferably with an open source tool to access it. It absolutely must be usable on LoseBlows, should be usable on Mac, and (for my own sake) on Linux and Solaris. It must be capable of structured documentation, numbering, tables, and embedded vector graphics. I just don't know of such a beast at present."
In the end, I have found that the only cross platform useful document formats are TeX, RTF, and SGML/XML DTD's. However, your mileage will vary no matter what (each editor seems to save RTF in its own way and you really cant have StyleSheets that cross over.)
:)
To put it bluntly.. other than ASCII (7bit) you are going to lose some people, mangle documents, and just about have someone complain about not being able to see stuff. That sadly is the cold hard facts of life..
I have found that Microsoft found out that the desktop killer app was word processing and killed anyone else in it
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PDF is better. Smaller, better font embedding, better cross platform support, incremental download/display for web download etc.
But, much as we hackers love to edit postscript by hand, normal people don't. The original message said editable
XML may be a way out, but there's no XML-based document format on the horizon. (I don't know about this Open E-Book stuff, though.) All in all, the OSS community has failed to provide an open, flexible document format that could compete with MS Word. I'm as unhappy with that as you are, but if you want to change it, all word processor developers must get together and formulate a standard. Is this ever going to happen? Note that most closed-source word processors want to bind their users to their product by using a proprietary, closed format.
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I think a bunch of you are missing the point. We shouldn't want to choose an office suite and make everyone use that. Having StarOffice's document format as the "standard" is just as bad as using MS's .doc. What we need is a file format that all the suites can use. This community's software is more about freedom --choices-- than anything else, so I don't really think we should be attempting to limit ourselves to one particular application to do all our word processing.
Too right! I used to try too keep up with .doc 2 .txt (or rtf or html) translators, but I've just given up. Now if I receive a .doc attachement, the sender gets an angry "This is a non-Microsoft site, please resend you mail in a readible format." To one persistent re-offender I sent as an attachment the output of cat /dev/urandom > urgent.doc.
Postscript is a spectacular presentation language for the final product, but it isn't much for editing. This guy wants something for "living" documents that people are going to have to edit...
LaTeX is awesome, and should run on all platforms. Of course it is not your mom's format, but what is more powerful then TeX? Easier then HTML, renders the same on all machines, and automates much of the problems associated with larger projects. With a brilliant WYSIWYG editor for LaTex/TeX, even your mother could use it to make dazzling slides, books, research papers, or grocery lists! Of course, you could use Nedit, Vim, or even (stinky) Emacs. The perfect tool, if only more would use it!
What I noticed about USB was that it emerged from a rather obscure ghetto after Windows 98 came out.
All my Pentium motherboards have headers on them for USB, and that means motherboards from long before the imac came out. They're easy to plug a cable/connector onto, and voila! USB on all my PC systems.
The zeal of Mac users continues to amaze us.
Hay thar.
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I seem to remember that MS developed RTF as a way to exchanging documents between Macs & PCs. As the original poster stated, MS has changed RTF quite a bit over the years, usually to follow the changes that they've made to Word. But at least the changes have been documented and are available on the web. A quick search with google will turn up several of the RTF specs. Most word processors that I know of will support RTF and there is at least one open source word processor (Ted) that uses RTF exclusively. I've used it and it's pretty good.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
i've asked this so many times in threads like this, but i always seem to get in too late to get any responses. i'd like to ask once again what's wrong with PDF documents?
it's my understanding the PDF is an open format. in fact, i've even heard that part of the reason why Apple used DisplayPDF in MacOS X is because they would have had to license Postscript from Adobe while PDF was royalty-free. if this is the case, why is it that opensource advocates hail Postscript, but denounce PDF?
i know that PDF is the format when you want to ensure that pages are printed correctly. that being said, they're still able to store text-content, they're compressed so they're a resonable size, and they're cross-platform (lots of programs can read PDFs these days, not just Acrobat)
now for the topic at hand, i understand that standards definitions would be best presented in a format that doesn't waste so much space on presentation: content is what should matter, which is why a Framemaker file format or XML might be best. but for casual documents, why don't we use PDF? it's surely a lot better than DOC.
so i'm asking: what's wrong with PDF? why can't more programs write to PDF as an export option? why can't more programs read PDFs for editing? am i missing something here?
please, somebody knowledgeable: enlighten me.
- j
I like RTF too - but did Microsoft really author it? I recall first seeing RTF around 1991 as an internet-centric file format. MS seemed to push the .DOC format over .RTF, and I thought that was because .DOC was spawn of MS, while RTF was not.
I could be wrong.
There is however a windows tex word processor who's name escapes me -- but it reads / writes tex files as its native format and allows you to write latex files in a interactive format, which IMHO is alot better then the "edit and compile" paradigm ...
This would really be the best of both worlds ... the unix heads can have their programming language latex, and the windows-bred secretaries can have a program that they can work with as well ...
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All the posts arguing for TeX, DocBook, XML, Star Office or Pathetic Writer are forgetting that a group that demands submissions in .doc format is obviously receiving them from people using Word and turning them over to other people using Word. Forcing everyone to use LaTeX or XML (or to write LaTeX or XML in Word) is a guarantee that the whole thing will grind to a halt.
HTML is an option; XML is not until Microsoft adds it as a "Save As" option.
Yes, XML appears to be the most viable alternative; and if I recall correctly Linus Torvalds suggested two years ago that it should be the native format for any Linux word-processor. However, since then KWord and others have come out, and I still haven't seen any attempts to support it... :(
:(
In my own little start-up project, I am in desperate need of an Excel-file format replacement. I am contemplating over XML, but besides being a lousy programmer I am even worse at reading specs...
But anyhow seems to be coming. My work will abandon development of Java GUIs (on top of C++ programs) in favor of XML GUI! That way any program can be called from within browsers, without the need for platform specific virtual machines!
My suggestion is: go for XML!
Perhaps it's time to actually have some standards body define a standard format for word processing, that presents an acceptable minimum of functionality. The cries of XML! XML!, while partially missing the point, as XML itself isn't up to the task, might be a start, since, at least in theory, an XML-based format would be both extensible and maintain backwards compatability, and have the added bennefit of being relatively easy to write implementations of.
Of course, opinions ( ie (_)*(_)s )what exactly constitutes the minimum acceptable functionality may vary but, as you know, committees are good at making sure that nobody is any happier with the results than anybody else.
Why doesn't such a standard exist already? Simple, no company wants to write a stable, open spec. for a minimal document, and if somebody were to attempt to do so other companies would not likely give it acceptance. This is why some committee, be it an organization, such as ISO, or a group of 'interested parties' agreeing to work together would be the best situation. This is probably outside of JEDEC's charter, but y'all may be able to pass the suggestion onto the appropriate parties.
So, in closing, such a spec would need to be:
- simple
- powerful
- open
- extensible
- ensure backwards compatability
... and most importantly set in stone
As you mentioned in your write-up, RTF fit most of these, but under the sole control of MicroSoft it kept changing. Perhaps, with their blessing, RTF would be a good basis for the new spec, as long as you can solidify the format, and keep it fixed for a length of time, ensuring backwards compatability between revisions.my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) publishes all its standards (the RFCs) for the Internet in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). You can also submit the document in PostScript, but the ASCII is the primary reference.
ASCII is searchable, printable, indexable, and forward compatible essentially forevermore. Everyone can display it correctly, anywhere. There is no better format for any kind of International standard. The IETF debates the question of superceding ASCII as the standard format about every other year, but we've yet to identify any other format that has ASCII's advantages.
HTML might one day replace ASCII in this capacity, but it needs to be stable for longer than it has been, and the HTML generators out there never generate correct HTML (ever looked at web pages in iCab? It has a built-in syntax checker, and even slashdot comes up with errors, all the time). Until those problems are fixed...
Well LaTeX files can compile into nice looking .pdf files which are viewable on any platform, plus they look exactly the same on every platform. Postscript also prints out very nicely and can be handled by just about any printer and platform. LaTeX is all I use for all my papers and documents I need to write.
There's also XML. I'm not sure how portable and consistant documents look using XML but it's supposed to be a portable document format.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Unless today's word processors can load & save PDF as if it were their native format, I don't see PDF as a solution here.
One of the things that the Sun/StarOffice project is doing, is to create this "OpenOffice" set of standards, with the current StarOffice codebase being the reference implementation. The set of standard document formats you wish for is one of their specific goals. Formats rich enough to handle the needs of business documents, but open enough to be vendor-neutral. Initially, the OpenOffice formats will be implemented by both StarOffice (the open source office suite) and StarPortal (Sun's upcoming online version).
I think this would be a good place to start. To make it even more buzzword-compliant, the OpenOffice formats will be XML-based. I'd be very happy to see the OpenOffice formats adopted not only by Star/Sun, but also by Abi, Gnumeric, K-office... who knows, maybe someone could even write a plug-in for MS Office to load and save documents in OpenOffice format. (If it's successful enough, MS will eventually have to do it themselves.)
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Microsoft makes this claim with each new generation of its office products. It has always turned out to be a lie.
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correct link
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A lot of the posts I see in this thread talk about XML, etc. You have to keep in mind that not everyone knows how, or wants to learn how to code just to write up a damn document!! I know I like doing some HTML / XML / ETC, but for your average joe that just wants to throw together a document, resume, or whatnot, anything other than Click Here, Format this with pretty fonts, and all that jazz is just too damn difficult!
TeX is a good idea. XML is probably better, and far more likely to actually happen. Of course, there's a zillion different ways that a paper could be stored in XML, so XML alone isn't the magic bullet. But it's a good start.
Whats wrong with HTML? I think it should be used as a standard for document interchange. In fact, guess what! It already is! The prejudics you have against HTML seems to be based on some sort of beutiful idea of stylistic perfection. Well, I don't give a shit about that - HTML is here, its now, and it can be read by loads of apps and its an open standard. HTML is the solution to your portable document problems.You're reading this alright, aren't you?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Specify .doc AS the standard .... and start a standardization process on it .... take it out of M$'s hands so that it becomes a non-issue
There's a window to do something about this right now, because Microsoft is tightening the screws on Office 2000 pricing. The amount of money companies have to spend on Microsoft Office is about to increase substantially. Technically, documenting the StarOffice format very well and encouraging other efforts to use it would be a good way to get started on the problem. From a business perspective, VA Linux or Red Hat ought to try pushing a desktop distribution that takes one install and provides the tools needed by, say, 70% of office workers. (Hint: support the first few companies that try this in a big way, to find out what's needed.)
We are talking students here, not the biz world. Most biz owners, small biz or enterprise, usually have the latest version of word...if they can't afford it they will pirate it. I don't know how many offices I've gone to where one person gets a copy and the whole office ends up with it, the idea being that they own the original Word, so this is still legal.
I have 2000 on my PC and 2001 on my Mac. I still save everything as Word 97 format. To counter act some of my other words, not everyone knows how to do this. Its a fucking simply task to say SAVE AS WORD 97, but no one can ever figure this out or remember to do so. I think the only difference I've seen between the two formats is that I can't get my vertical lettering on the headers of charts, so I always save as the most compatible version. Think about it, its the most compatible software in the Biz world and dead simply to use and people still can't figure out how to SAVE AS how are they going to learn a whole new software package???
Yes, there are a dozen word formats, but only 2 or 3 in actual use. As for Works, I remember this package back when I get my first Packard Bell 486 (never go shopping with parents who won't listen to the fact that the computer sucks because they will only look at the price). Do they still sell it??? It is only a dot DOC in name only.
As for images and stuff??? Only Powerpoint sedative??? You obviously haven't had to transmit scientific data back and forth in an understandable format. Yeah, we send out excel and SPSS files in their original format, but sometime folks need to see a quick summerization of the data and this completely requires Tables. Need to show a diagram? Yeah, we normally send out a PDF (or even a Photoshop with all the different layers broken down) but the fact of today is that if they need to open a second file to get at it, they probably won't.
I do agree that it is best to send out a plain text version of the file along with proprietary format, but I'd do so just so I don't have to open up a word processor in places I don't have one. My office computer doesn't have word on it, so I either have to pull out the laptop, go to my employees desk or simply pull up one of my plain text versions to see if I even need to go to the trouble of opening the file in normal mode. Most of the time I don't, so I agree with ya, but only for convienence sake.
M$ Office may not be the standard forever, but it will be for the forsakable future. If it turns out that it isn't, you will still be able to convert the documents as easy as it is to get your 20 year old IBM Selectric typewritter fixed today (our secretary still has one of these at her desk for filling out paper forms).
clif
Openoffice is seeking to address this. This may be of no consequence for someone needing a solution to today, but I thought I'd mention this.
the link is xml.openoffice.org. Draft formats are available for download, and you can follow the development on the mailing list there as well.
What country is this where all these businesses are so up-to-date and have all the latest versions and patches installed and all that? This is the same smoothly running oh-so-professional biz world that can't keep 15 year old script kiddies out of their boxes?
Yes, there really are people still using Works, in every flavor and version from 2.0 to 2000. Even in business. And of course everyone would be better off if they could figure out how to "save as...[some older relatively more compatible format]."
What about my original question: How is this any different from everyone just using whatever word processor they like? If you use Word, you have to save an extra copy in some lower-level format. If you don't use Word, same deal. So why are you obligated to use Word at all? It won't make your files any more portable.
Once upon a time, Wordperfect was The Standard with over 70% market share. * All word processors since then support the file format, due to the market share it enjoyed.
You can do most everything you want within that 1987 standard.
Most modern Wordprocessors especially those of the evil empire will embed astonishing quantities of useless unnecessary glop but there are public domain programs which will clean that crap out nicely.
If my personal favorite file format gets popular again, somebody with a clue may even buy it off Corel and release a reasonable upgrade.
I for one would jump on a chance to buy a stable Wordperfect 5.4! It's not competitive as a general document prep tool, without WSIWG; but as a programming tool, I have to go there nearly every day for a function that just doesn't work as well in other processors: Search/replace on CR, or Cut/copy/past a rectangle of monospaced text.
* Why that was lost has been flogged to death eleswhere. Beyond some poor decisions on the part of the products former custodians, the primary suspect's initials are BG.
In Nearly All Paradigms, Shift Happens.
If not LyX you may be thinking Scientific Word for Windows which is commercial, sold by TCI soft
You must not know what postscript is.... Postscript is ASCII that tells devices like printers and applications where to draw lines put text etc. Now, editing a compicated document w/ postscript is difficult, and I would not suggest that PS become a replacement for .doc since it is difficult, but, it is most certainly editable from any program that can load and save text.
.ps file, which you put to your printer.
PS is a good "end" format, IE you take docbook and convert it to tex which makes a dvi, which you make into a
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
RTF is a pretty robust fotmat. It supports tables, embedded graphics, numbered and bulleted lists, and lots more. The format is freely available (oh, and you'll never guess where it comes from) [warning: this is all HTML. Somewhere, there is a text file with this info. Your challenge: find it.]. It's been updated to support pretty much every feature of Word2000, so it should be able to do everything .DOC can do. Of course, using extentions like that will only defeat the purpose, but the point is, RTF is an excellent format.
An earlier post attributed the spec to DEC, but I believe MS came up with it. It was first published in Microsoft Systems Journal somewhere in the early 90s, back when that used to be a useful magazine (ah, the good old days before world domination). It's a pretty clean format, too. As I recall, it's more or less a tagged data format, so you go through reading tags and N bytes of data belonging to them, ignoring and skipping stuff you don't understand. So you can read that fancyass Word doc with all the pretty crap when your reader just supports tables and lists. Nice.
The other formats mainly mentioned here are XML, HTML, and Tex/LaTex variants. Unfortunately, they aren't as good a solution for several reasons. First and most importantly, they're not supported by everybody. RTF gets you support in every common word processor, on every platform you might encounter, going back almost 10 years. Yup, use that nice old version of Wordperfect 4 for DOS that fits on a floppy. Hell, Emacs probably has a module for RTF support.
Also, HTML isn't a very good layout language. XML is complex, and Tex and such are pretty much only on Unix. XML also needs DTDs and such, so you may have several files that all need to go together.
So, to belabor the point: Write in any app, save in native format. Export to RTF and send away. Or just keep it in RTF.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
I think the best way to store your documents in some sort of XML application, either using one of the predefined applications or designing one that fits your needs yourself.
The advantages are obvious:
Staroffice has all the features you describe, and is portable.
The answer is simple: just use ASCII.
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Did XML kidnap your cat?
:)
:) The reason why I replied to that post was that while it might be implied to you and me, it might not be implied to everything. The tone of that post struck me as, "Use XML - it's easy and simple," whereas using XML is not necessarily so simple nor easy. Lots of work to be done if you'll be writing your own DTD, and lots of learning to do if you don't.
:)
Nope, just trying to clear up some issues.
I think it's safe to assume that defining a DTD was implied. It's simply easier to say "Use XML" than to say "Write a good DTD to use with XML"
I don't think it was implied. It was mentioned casually. But that wasn't my point. Choosing to use XML is like choose either a binary or text document format. Just saying "use XML" doesn't mean a whole lot. The format itself is really the DTD that's used. Whether or not writing a good DTD was implied, it is certainly a whole lot more complicated than the poster was making it out to be. XML is no magic wand.
How could it possibly be device-dependent? This is just text, we're talking about.
It's waaay too easy to make things device-dependant. For instance, think about printing a modern, full-featured HTML page. It is a device-dependant language; it's meant to work within a browser, of a certain size rage, with a certain colour depth, etc., etc.. It will look great in your browser, but it doesn't lend well to printing. So you have to choose your language/DTD carefully.
Easy rendering has nothing to do with the XML DTD or document, that's the responsibility of the XSL that would accompany it, or the application that parses the document.
Okay, sorry. So, if you want to use XML, you'll need a good DTD, *and* a good XSL(or a good application).
Easy editing is pretty straightforward. Just edit it. This goes along with comprehensive. A good DTD can be comprehensive, but it can also leave room for extension without breaking that document. It is, after all, the extensible markup language.
Now, I'm only going to argue semantics on this one. "Easy" is subjective. You're right, it's easy to look into the document and edit it, but that doesn't make editing easy. I can easily look into a MS Word document and edit it. That doesn't mean I'll do anything useful, nor does it mean it'll be fast.
I wouldn't say XML without a DTD is useless, but I will say XML without a DTD is silly. It's a simple, logical assumption that if you're writing XML documents, they should have a DTD, so you know what's allowed. Like I said before, it seems like this would be implied.
Well, you obviously know what you're talking about
Thanks for the reply, though
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Use a nice SGML/XML application like DocBook. Tools for manipulation are free, anyone can write DocBook, with or without specialist tools (it looks a lot like HTML to the layman).
Don't use HTML, at least use XHTML making sure that you segregate style from content. If you must use HTML, use stylesheets so that formatting is consistent.
But, my recommendation would be to use DocBook (SGML) and use stylesheets and nice free parsers to output TeX, ASCII, RTF, HTML and whatever else people want.
I apologize, and you're right :) The poster didn't mention that a good DTD would need to be written(a lot of work, I might add), and I didn't mention that a good set of XSLs would need to be written :)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
readable anywhere.
I just happened to buy StarOffice 5.2 for $40 two days ago. Then I went to work yesterday to discover that the company documents were now in Word 2000 format. I still have a Window 95 box at work for MS Outlook and Word. No one was sure if Word2K would run on Win95, so that meant I would have to a) "upgrade to Win98 or Win2k, and b) up[grade to a new machine. So I installed StarOffice instead, which supports word2k format. I installed it on Win95, Linux, and Solaris. I can even use it from my FreeBSD box as an X application on Solaris.
Try that with Word [97, 2k, 2.001k, etc etc).
Watch your tone. We're having a good discussion here. Of course, I'm assuming that you're posting anonymously because you don't like cookies - not because you're a troll.
The poster didn't answer the question that had been asked very well. They talked about XML as a good thing, but they didn't talk about the bad things(which you must know about when trying to make an informed decision). I was just trying to clear the issue up a bit. The bad things about XML being that you've got to write a good DTD, and good XSLs, etc., etc..
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
It may be difficult to find a completely open solution that runs on all platforms and has easy WYSIWYG editing (assuming you want this), so if, for political reasons, you end up having to choose between Word and FrameMaker, at least choose FrameMaker. At the behest of the engineering department, our company recently dumped Word in favor of FrameMaker for several reasons:
1. It runs on more platforms - It doesn't run on Linux, but it runs on the MAC, Windows, and most popular UNIX variants including Solaris and HP-UX.
2. It supports SGML. This lets you solve the bit rot problem even though you may be using a proprietary tool and proprietary intermediate format.
3. The MIF interchange format is robust and is both forward and backward compatable if you are careful - we have been able to easily move documents back and forth between Frame 5.x and 6.0 using the MIF format. The MIF format is also a documented and parsable text format and as such is more portable than
4. It's already a de-facto standard in large standards bodies (such as IEEE 802.3, which I deal with).
If you want near-WYSIWYG editing tools, TeX/LaTeX is only a good choice if you stay in UNIX, since there are no good near-WYSIWYG editing tools (that I know of) for MAC, and perhaps not even for Windows.
Let's face it, .doc is not about to go to the wayside anytime soon. It's also one of the strongest reasons most *nix shops keep at least one copy of Windows/Office around. If a viable reverse engineering of the .doc could be performed, than it wouldn't be an issue. It would also be very useful for many reasons beyond this.
The biggest bonus is the number of tools that'll author it.
I dont think your asking for anything XML based, as others have rightly pointed out -- which DTD, or schema? You could use DocBook, but then you have to find an authoring tool.
With RTF, you can continue to use Word, or you can use other tools that work on other platforms.
You can forget about the underpinnings of getting the job done, and focus on the doing of work.
The problem with .DOC is the typical Microsoft problem: Microsoft beats other people to market by "just getting the job done". They hack up what needs to be done, if it works 90% it's OK, and maybe they document it later. They are even proud of that and seem to think it's the right way to go because they actually beat everybody else to market; let's hope the customers will wake up to this and stop buying.
The latest .DOC format is supposedly XML (with embedded binary). That will help somewhat, in that it will at least make the text and other important information accessible without a complex OLE infrastructure. But to take full advantage of the information found in .DOC will still not be possible. The .DOC format often contains scripting and all sorts of other extensions, and the actual semantics of those can depend heavily on the environment or a buried deep inside some MS Word module.
Note that inside Microsoft, there now seems to be another approach, NetDocs. If it delivers what it claims to, a fully XML-based standards-compliant, end-user document and information management system, I have my doubts that that will catch on--it is way out of character for Microsoft.
A prime example of LaTeX was a computer simulation I did for my physics course. The program made output files for gnuplot, after which a simple Makefile would plot graphs and run LaTeX, producing the report. I could rerun it many times to see how the data varied at each trial. At least it impressed my friends using LoseBlows..
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I think that tex would be the best format as such. I would rather see it be tex than HTML, and certainly rather see it be tex than doc. You don't want to give a company control over the format, especially not for a hardware setup. DOC is WAYYY to volatile. It also seems a bit bulky. As for HTML, also kind of bulky, good at what it's used for, but certainly not a replacement for tex.
BTW, I wouldn't think of it as a replacement for the DOC format, I would think of it as doing things right from the start. Doc is good for what it does, but what I think you are describing is MUCH more suited to tex.
Eh...
Agreed. LaTeX is bound to be a frequently suggested alternative, but IMHO it's the wrong answer: XML has been designed for exactly this purpose, and it fits your needs perfectly.
XML can easily (dare I suggest it, trivially) be transformed into XML documents - in fact, this is the approach my current employers take for a number of types of business documents - XML is the format for representing the data, and LaTeX or HTML or whatever can become the format used for making this available to the user - XSL transformations allow us to take a language-independent set of data and translate it into a document in a suitable format.
If you want true independence from propietrary data formats (and open source applications can have data formats that are just as restrictive as closed source applications to most users) then XML is the only real choice right now - a well defined XML document should be readable even *without* a parser, and with a well-defined DTD and a series of appropriate XSL files, you can select your own viewer application. What could possibly be better? Certainly not Word, StarOffice, LaTeX or any of the other competitors in this arena.
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Both LaTeX and HTML suffer from the fact that they are evolving standards. You would have to also pick a version, and face the fact there might come a day when there is a loss of backwards compatability.
I think the best idea is something that is extra simple, and unlikely to change in the future; that is ASCII.
Sorry, but as an old TeX-head, I can tell you with satisfaction that writing one document in it does not make you literate in its varied commands. TeX does have a ridiculously high learning curve, and added to which it is only a display markup language - it does nothing to infer context and meaning in the content itself, which we've all learned by now is something you want to preserve.
Wasn't FrameMaker supposed to be superseded (sp?) by InDesign? (Which happens to be a win32-only product for now)
Or am I confusing things here?
Maybe someone needs to come up with a .doc type which is open source? I dont think any of the XML/TeX/html ideas would fly; we're talking about a document which is WYSIWYG when it's open in an editor, and .txt files are insufficient for that kind of thing.
Why not .EXT- enhanced text which would be open source (maybe GPLed so that noone can use it to create a really good, but proprietary format)?
We wrestled with the same problem when I was working for Northwestern U. The CIC (Conference of Big 10 schools plus U of C) held a joint session between archivists and geeks to see what could be done. Lots of good academic information/data is simply going to be lost as MS - Word ages through different versions. In fact it's already being lost. The problem is serious enough that the archivists were sticking paper. (Now there's a scary thought.) In there case, this was partly from a "natural" suspicion of all things technological. I had suggested developing standards for submission that asked faculty and scholars to submit .txt files, but, alas, this got no where.
The only other obvious suggestion is SGML built from an already established DTD. There are some freebies out there, but editing SGML raises a whole new set of problems.
Ask Slashdot: Is KtB a moron or a troll? Does it matter?
Now, I'm only going to argue semantics on this one. "Easy" is subjective. You're right, it's easy to look into the document and edit it, but that doesn't make editing easy. I can easily look into a MS Word document and edit it. That doesn't mean I'll do anything useful, nor does it mean it'll be fast.
:) The reason why I replied to that post was that while it might be implied to you and me, it might not be implied to everything. The tone of that post struck me as, "Use XML - it's easy and simple," whereas using XML is not necessarily so simple nor easy. Lots of work to be done if you'll be writing your own DTD, and lots of learning to do if you don't.
:) Fortunately most of the work is initial stuff.
:)
Granted. I imagine things will get easier as editors become more widespread that are geared towards editing XML documents. The editor could make sure you stay within the DTD, speed up the writing time involved.. Until then it's all being done by hand.
Well, you obviously know what you're talking about
Yeah, looking over the original post again, he probably should've been more clear. It sounds like he's been using XML for awhile, and forgot about the issues involved in actually learning it.
Been fun.
How about Rich Text? Nope, its only marginally better than regular text. No images or tables (last I looked).
.doc. I remember doing that 2 years ago, when I was advising my friends to nOT use .doc in their email attachments, to prevent macro viruses from spreading, and to save bandwidth, as .doc is wasteful, compared to rtf.
Wrong. You can embed pictures in rtf just as you do with
Sigged!
Ok whats so dangerous and offensive about .DOC? Oh yeah, /. is a geek forums where nothing needs to be practial or make sense.
:-(
I can't believe I read through all the posted (eeer...the +1 posted) threads and no one really seems to get the clue. We are talking about technical standards for businesses and stuff. Whats you average secretary going to have on her desk? WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD! What is your average director going to have on his desk? The same. How about all the managers and submanagers? Yup.
So get a grip, this is more or less a geek exercise that will never come to any realization. If I look at this as such, one can see tons of different software to use out there. Others have already mentioned HTML. Cool, other than the fact there are very few good tools for editing these and the average person has no use for them and won't have them handy. I still prefer VI, BBEDIT, and Notepad in that order for HTML and then get into such things like Dreamweaver Ultradev for when I want simple clicky solutions 'cause I have libraries and templates built up for my employees to use.
Next is simply the Text format. Well that can't include images (unless we're talking those of the ascii variety)...tables are outta the question too unless you can make sure that everyone is using monospaced fonts...try explaning that to the PHBs and their secretaries.
How about Rich Text? Nope, its only marginally better than regular text. No images or tables (last I looked).
Sun Office? Wordperfect? Who the hell is dealing with this still? I am an academic in my side career (ok the one that actually pays which is kinda pathetic) and occasionally get these docs. I usually send them right back with the instructions that I can't open them. I don't like being sent wierd formats that few can open. Its obnoixious.
PDF? Well thats a display language for all intensive purposes, it ain't an editable document language. I prefect everything I don't need to edit be sent in this format as well as its original format...the problem is few folks actually have a need for PDF so its not on the desktop.
This leaves us back with Microsoft Word. I use it nearly every day. Do I like using it? Well there were this big gap for a few years in which it was maturing from the Mac side where there was too much feature bloat and not enough user interface testing so ya never knew how to use anything, but it is really nice right now. I'm using Office 2001 on my Powerbook and I love it. There are two, exactly two, products I stand behind with Microsoft - Word and Internet Explorer. One has always been its crown jewel and they've used it to their advantage several times (we'll never see an Intel version of the Mac OSs simply because M$ would do what they can to remove any and all use of Word from it and constantly uses this as the big gun when anyone thinks of it) but it works pretty well and is standard across the biz world. The other Internet Explorer was born outta bastard ideas of taking over the internet, and if all companies decided to take over the word by giving quality products, well then I'm not going to stand infront of them...crying shame 90% of the IE users are using Windows variants though
Anywho, DOC is a biz standard. This isn't going to change. If M$ does break up, which is pretty unlikely with Dubau in the hot seat (heh and he'd do anything to fuck over Bois right now even if he were in agreeance), it would turn into seperate Office and OS companies. Who wants to bet that an M$ Office company unfettered by trying to prop up a horrible OS would start porting to other OSs? Who wants to bet that if either ever went bankrupt that the Office company would be the last standing?
blah blah blah...just my opinion...
clif
I think you are confused. LaTeX *is* designed with with generalized structural markup in mind. (OTOH TeX focuses on specific markup.) In LaTeX you use commands like \section and \chapter and \emph, and (generally) not layout markup commands like ``itallics'' or font sizes.
``LaTeX is, to a large extent, an example of a `generic markup language' (GML). Thanks to the class file mechanism, the visual style of the various document elements are described in a single place outside of the source document itself'' (The LaTeX Companion, 7).
I hope that clarifies things.
--Ben
Consider using TeX/LaTeX, postscript, or an XML/SGML variant, like DocBook or HTML.
Basically, what you want is a format the fits the following criteria:
1) The original text can be easily gotten out of the format. This way even if the programs that read the file go the way of the dodo, future programs could still recover the data.
2) The specification is fully open and documented, and preferrably stable and mature.
3) At least one open-source program handles displaying/converting the format. I would recommend storing a copy of this program in the same place as the standards themselves- including shipping source with standards CDs.
You've gotten over the hardest part already- you've realized you have a problem.
Brian
You mean people edit those MicroSoft Word documents at the byte level? I didn't know that, I was always under the impression that they cheated with some program called "Word". Well, apparently such cheater programs are not allowed...
Its portable, not going away, its been around a long time, and no one is screwing around with the spec, adding new and undocumented features.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
For those unfortunately souls out there that doesn't know *roff, you may call it a precursor of SGML/HTML, but with thousand of Office Users (AT&T Patent Department was, I believe, the first customer). If I'm not misremembering, troff was the reason K&R, Ossano etc. got funding for continued development of UNIX.
Cheers, Roland Buresund
-- Roland Buresund MBA, MCMI, CISSP
It presumes a DTD to use XML. Also XML, being what it is allows the creation of constructs that reference DB queries in a standard manner, this would allow you to define table constructs and queries to fill the tables as well as other external sub-document referents to approach the OpenDoc ex-standard of Apple, IBM, Novel, et al capabilities. Windows Access and others already allows XML formated export of databases. Rise CyberDog! Rise! ...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
"(i'd also like to note that Word's inability to properly handle complex documents has nothing to do with the file format, so i don't really know how you got onto that tangent talking about file formats.)"
With FrameMaker and Microsoft Word, you are nearly incapable of separating the tool to create your documents from the documents themselves. You are tied to one platform to create and maintain your documents. Are there any free software alternatives that handle FrameMaker *well* (I don't know of any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist)? Are there any free software alternatives that handle Microsoft
If you're going to use
I'm *complaining* about my Product Management group choosing MS word for PRD's. It stinks, and everyone knows it, but they are not willing to make the jump into SGML/XML with DocBook, which is *perfect* for Product Requirement Documents. It's a good learning curve, and until a company makes it policy that they do it the right way, people will choose the only way they understand.
I don't agree the FrameMaker is the best tool for the job of Documentation, regardless of the proprietary file format. Distinguishing the file format (XML/SGML) from the document structure (DocBook DTD) from the presentation (some kind of SL, like Norman Walsh's excellent DSSSL) allows the utmost flexibility in your documentation. You can compile the code into anything your DSL/XSL can handle, and it is trivial to update documentation.
Anyway, back to the basic issue I had with your post: In most cases, it is very difficult to discuss file formats without discussing the tools you use to manipulate them.
Matt Barnson
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
If you choose TeX/LaTeX as a standard, which is a good idea partly because of the quality of the output and because of the way it can handle complex templates, you can edit LaTeX rather easily using open source tools like LyX or KLyX. They're not perfect (yet!) but it's a good way to start using LaTeX in an almost-WYSIWYG fashion.
As previous posters have pointed out, TeX runs on more than just Linux =)
There are a few problems with using TeX/LaTeX. The first is that TeX tries to do paragraph-by-paragraph layout, and often winds up in tight spots that it doesn't need to. The average user wouldn't have a clue about what to do with overfull hboxes.
Another problem is that it's not really possible to do WYSIWYG, and those people who use lots of spaces instead of tabs (even with variable width fonts, heh) will have a rough time adjusting to that. People will complain about things like "well in Word the line wraps this way..." BTW this is a problem with Word itself; it's figure placement is really screwy.
Finally, those of us in academia who write papers in LaTeX can no longer look down on those whose use of Word is obvious by the terrible aesthetics of their papers.
Obviously, there are lots of advantages, and for Microsoft, possibly the nicest thing about TeX is that there are no known bugs. (not that Microsoft will have any problem adding some...)
FrameMaker started in the UNIX world, and is currently available for Solaris, HPUX, and AIX platforms, as well as for Macs and for Winblows, umm... excuse me. I meant Windows.
I suggest a visit to CERN for a very nice, real-world run down of FrameMaker. Good enough for CERN, good enough for me.
Another good site to check out is Cisco Systems, who maintains better than 10000 (yes, ten thousand) pages in FrameMaker. I'd give you the link, but I can't find it (bookmark overload ;-) )
FedEx and Motorola are also big FrameMaker advocates. (Well, me, too, but I'm a fanatic)
CERN:
http://docsys.web.cern.ch/docsys/framemaker/
FrameMaker System Requirements (Adobe Systems):
http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/systemreq s.html
Cheers!
My experience is the opposite. Where I work, Office 97 is the standard, along with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. The company (Fortune 50 corporation) is conservative about upgrading to new versions of software. They don't want to spend money on new software unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I don't know anyone who has Windows 2000 or Office 2000 on their work PC.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
For straight wordprocessing where no layouts are required, it's great. It's ascii with the expressive power of italics and extended symbol recognition. For straight word smithing, that's all anybody needs.
Here's what I do:
1. Do all wordprocessing using a very basic text editor which saves very basic RTFs.
2. Import those files to whatever layout program is needed. (Quark, Pagemaker, whatever.)
The stability of RTFs lies in two areas; Firstly, there will ALWAYS be a selection of homemade editors available upon which to do your writing, and second, there is no financial incentive for big software manufacturers to make RTFs un-importable to their suites and layout packages.
This means that doing all your basic work in RTF will make files readable for a long time to come.
In any case, particularly in the print publishing field, today's software is finally about as good as it needs to get. There's no real reason to switch tools. Unlike with graphics technology, Times Roman simply doesn't need to motion blur and bump map for a writer to work his or her craft. As long as we all keep our old copies of Wordperfect and Pagemaker, everything is fine.
Fantastic Lad
...I'm sure this will sound redundant, too, but why not Latex? If you are currently using Word and Framemaker, Latex will give you all the same features without the bit rot. It converts to HTML as well as the other two, it has WYSIWYG interfaces (Lyx), and it is available on all platforms (AFAIK). If you use it with truetype fonts, it even looks a lot like the output you get from Framemaker and Word, except that your document will most likely be better structured. It does graphics, tables, and indices. It allows for multiple source files, all in plain text, meaning that it works great with CVS--a real benefit for development by a group. Perhaps best of all, you can use PDFlatex, which will turn the output into a PDF, including searchable text. Since (almost) all OSs can view PS or PDF, this gives you two great portable, printable output formats, and latex2html gives you a web version. Sounds like a winner to me.
Just FYI, Word 2000 document format is backwards compatable with 97. And yes, it runs under Win95.
Portable Document Format anyone?(hrm this is probably redundant)
As far as I know, the spec is open and there are some open source viewers (although you may as well just use Adobe's, I haven't really liked any of the ones I tried.) There is the dvipdfm package to convert LaTeX dvi output to pdf files and apparently there are Word plugins(?) that have the same effect.
Sure, it isn't perfect, but it has a wide user base and the tools are out there.
Sorry, us old school DOS people never go away
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Not just MacPerl, POD is the standard perl doc format, and is very intelligent in the context of perl (embed docs within code!). I believe that one of the camel books were written in pod, actually.
Good call!
1. It's itself not a standardized standard, and the different dialects are evolving continuously.
2. A document can be rendered quite differently by different browsers.
3. You can't even get things like page numbers in HTML documents.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you.
XML is nothing more than a concept - you store data and text within "tags". The tags can be of pretty much any name. The data can be anything. This isn't a standard, it's not even a format.
Basically, XML boils down to: store it in a text file, delimit data, fields, and content by tags. Sorry, that doesn't cut it. You have to do more.
No, if you want to think about using XML for this, you need to talk about the DTD, not XML itself.
So, the question becomes, which DTD? In order to compete with the competition(LaTeX, HTML, PostScript), it has to be: device-independant, easily rendered, easily edited, and extremelycomprehensive.
Don't shout "XML!!". XML, without a DTD, is almost useless, especially for this application. The DTD has to be all those things I mentioned, plus(for this application), it needs to be standard.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Note the use of was. In the days of 1 MB Macs, Windows 3.0 and DOS, Word allowed USERS (not programmers) to get their stuff done. USERS don't want to care if they are using a computer, or a typewriter or a pen, then want to get their words out and be able to manage those words.
WordPerfect offered a fine interface - if you were a programmer from Utah. SHIFT-F7, Y Y to exit - nice. Invisible formatting commands ++ick. Who thought this was still a good idea. Beats WordStar, but so does Emacs and VI.
Word won the mind share.
In order to win back any of that, you need
- tools that USERS can handle well
- tools that save to and read from these formats
Given a choice, I'd be fine to start with a DOC -> XML and XML->DOC cli converters. Similiar to the graphics conversion tools that abound on Unix (pnmtoFOO and FOOto(pnm|png)), these could leave us time to actually make XML (or whatever) a USABLE standard. Get "save as" into the open tools (Star Office, Koffice, etc). Pressure the "friendly" vendors to get it into WordPerfect, FrameMaker, etc. Perhaps MS will come around.If they don't - well, we make sure there are conversion tools that do it for them.
I'm sick of being on the road with a non-GUI ssh interface to my mail and having someone send me info I need in Word. WordPerfect won't read Word 2k doc's yet. I've taken to replying to salesmen in Applix, Makers and LaTeX just to annoy them.
So a Standard that nobody uses is quite useless (see recent IETF forays into printing standards for examples). We need a standard, but we need tools that can actually use them. Tools that USERS can use.
Just a slight correction, the DoD standard for documents is the 2 latest revisions of MS's .DOC format.
Someday I'll make
I hadn't heard of DocBook, so I went fishing on docbook.org for some basic info.
The state of the documentation for this product is fairly lacking. (Hey, it's a DOCUMENT application!) There's no "getting started with DocBook" stuff. There's no official tutorial.
The closest thing to a tutorial I found is this page: DocBook intro. I'll excerpt the front page.
Here is my tutorial on DocBook. I never completed it, but it is still useful, since others don't focus on a complete beginner tutorial.
Last modified: Mon Jul 27 11:19:57 1998
Frankly, this sums up my issue with many Open Source projects: making a technically superior tool is not enough to generate wide user acceptance. There has to be an easy migration path from what the user's already got.
DocBook needs at least ONE of the following to get people going:
RTF/DOC/FrameMaker/TeX to DocBook converters, supporting at least a good 75% of basic features,
A usable migration tutorial that assumes the user already makes RTF/DOC/FrameMaker/TeX documents,
A usable editor that shows the results, even if it has to be two-paned to show both source and results.
I'm not flaming Open Source in general, but this is not the first time I have heard of a tool that would fit my needs exactly, except they put very large barriers to entry in my path.
[
The difference is in the purpose of the markup - XML is (generally, with a good design) syntactic markup. LaTeX is entirely structural markup, specifying not *what* a particular element is, but how it is to be displayed. As a result, XML is easier to tailor to a particular application's needs - from the XML document you can trivially create the equivalent LaTeX document. The same does not hold true the other way round.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Abiword and Gnumeric both use XML for their native format (especially if you're looking for an Excel-file format replacement - look at gnumeric). I don't know about the KOffice stuff, but I suspect it also uses XML.
Also be aware that XML is like SGML - it's a language for defining markups - the issue is the DTDs (Document Type Descriptions) that define the exact markup of a specific format.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
. . . . right.
I can see M$ going for this one right now. (HA HA HA!)
This means that the file format would have to be made a part of the public domain.
IANAL, but I think this would take a prodigious amount of legal wrangling.
I personally prefer a format like xml or html where you can see the tags, etc. and figure out what is going on, if someone made a mistake. Mind you, this is just me, just a personal preferance.
I also wonder about designing a file format for the future, given the various changes in technology. As an example, there is a new technology that has been demonstrated providing 3d displays in shocking detail, no special glasses needed. Not a Moving Picture yet, but you get the idea. How to incorporate this? The file format has to be scalable and adaptable.
MS word does really horrible at things like books, where it is better to use a page layout program like Pagemaker.
so it looks like we have to re-invent the wheel here, and include all of those features that make the best sense. Yet another Open Source project for the masses.
Don't look so enthuthiastic now!
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Thanks for showing the maturity everyone has come to expect from the linux community.
Hey linsux users - grow up.
When I'm at a conference or using a laptop in general, I do write in html because a) it gives you massive cred to any shoulder-surfers and b) it can be less power-intensive and less prone to laptop mouse problems.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Yesss! It drives all of us, I'm sure, mad. I just finished a screenplay using Word Perfect 8. In a screenplay the formatting is critical. Try to find a in another format that saves your macro formatting also. Good luck. I remember nostalgically the good old days of Wordstar. It did a great job and fit on a 5 1/2" floppy. Since then we have Microshizen changing their wp every year just so they can flog new garbage that does the same old job. Will somebody please write a great word processor that saves in RTF and allows you to easily record macros. Period. And don't tell me StarOffice. It runs like it's made from recycled tin cans.
don't hold your breath waiting for Adobe (which bought Frame from Steve Kirsch for $500Million dollars!) to release a new version.
Certainly, you have to assign meaning to tags in order for data to be formatted correctly. The whole point of XML is that data carry traits and structure (which of course, can be inherited).
This is where the concept of a template would come in. I had mentioned this but you must have looked over it.
You have a set of rules defined that determine what certain tags do. Very similar to HTML now (table, p, b, div, etc. are all assigned functionality). With XML, these templates can even be a part of the document with tags that flag them as such. The trick is to put as little of this in the hands of the word processor itself.
I never said "XML! XML!" all by itself. XML is fairly abstract. Obviously we need everything that works along side of it and I'm talking about all supporting technologies if I'm talking about XML. If you read the article again, you'll notice the question was about document formats, not whether or not we'll need templates to go along with our XML formatted data.
Is that really that difficult? Do we no longer have the ability to write and read something in just plain text? For those who have read a standard document lately (eg HTML spec, RFCs) there is nothing in there that *require* fancy formatting, fonts and what not. It is just pages and pages of TEXT descipting some problems and their solutions.
If you want spelling or grammer checks (god know I *need* them :-), fine, use a WP of your choice but just save the document as plain text. Want diagrams? It wouldn't kill you to say "Refer to Diagram A1" which is attached separately.
Send me you DOC not
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Yeah.. I can see how it's easily portable with graphics, doing chapters, PAGE BREAKS, headers and footers on pages (which may or may not be common) and have you ever pulled in HTML to edit on any of the above?
Ok, I'll bite.
Firstly, you seem to be missing the main point of the question. This isn't about finding a generic format for page layout - it's about how to best transfer specification documents so that they can be written anywhere and read anywhere. HTML works wonderfully for this.
Secondly, _yes_, you can do all of the above, when it makes _sense_ to do so.
Page breaks? Easy. Have a set of linked documents instead of one big page. This is useful under some circumstances (like dividing a large document into sections).
Chapters? Um, you _have_ the tools to emphasize chapter headings, and you _have_ page breaks if you really feel you have to use them. Where's the problem?
Graphics? If I need a figure, that's what the image tag is for. If I want to have anything fancier than an image in a box... then I should have someone else write the standards document. Again, we aren't making magazine articles here - the goal is to find a format suitable for a *technical description*. Visual gingerbread is _counterproductive_; it distracts the reader.
Headers/footers? Frames work fine for that, if you have a real reason to use them. I personally can't think of any, for this application. For my own documents, if I'm writing something that must be pretty, I use a script to prettify things consistently.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
--
After wasting an entire afternoon with this, I cut and paste everything to Netscape Gold (paid for), and Netscape has been my preferred word processor ever since.
The HTML generated by Netscape Gold and/or 4.x is just the basics, and all that are really needed. Word's exporting of HTML is full of junk to fix the width at a size that I don't nesessarily use my browser at, shrinks the font to be unreadably small, inserts a lot of strange characters instead of single and double quotes resulting in strange Kanji characters, and wastes space by specifying fonts that I don't even have in my machine on every line making the HTML file 30 times as large as need be.
I have no problem using a seperate utility for graphics (GIMP), but don't think that most M$ users could adjust to that.
What, exactly, is the problem with the Word document format? Couldn't open source programmers add features after Microsoft stops using it (anaylise it, "emulate" it, build off it)?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I have used LaTeX for years for technical documentation and have never had a single bit rot on me ;-) It is much more useful for organizing your thoughts in a coherent framework than HTML and even MS or other word-processing standards, and, of course, it is easily translated to HTML, PostScript, PDF, etc.
The suits think that the tech types who use it are crazy because they can't edit our documents, but it truly makes my documentation efforts more efficient.
LaTeX receives my full endorsement.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Why is everyone clamoring about Star/Open Office? It is so slow and bloated, i'd rather lay out pixels manually to create text... Don't get me wrong, it is nice to have GPL software galore, but this is not going to be the msoffice-killer. Abiword, on the other hand is a nice, lightweight wordprocessor. it does not yet have the features to take on word, but it is clear that soon enough, it will be ready. it does not drag your system to a halt or eat up all your memory. it just works. its .abw file format is XML based, and it can read .doc documents without much problem. it is not ready to use for producing a novel yet, but can do so many things, that it is fine for everyday use. it is free (GPL) and fast and wonderful. it is the only wordprocessor i use now.
I think that people who worship Star/Open Office should take a look at AbiWord (available for windows, linux, beos, qnx, BSD, AIX, irix, and solaris and can be compiled on pretty much anything as far as i know--probably required some libs though). It is amazing and fast, just what you would want from a word processor. StarOffice is way to slow for me, not to mention it is very cumbersome to use. AbiSource is the web site for AbiWord. Please go there and download the latest release, you will not regret it.
ps...a new version has just been released. although i have not had the chance to try it, i'm sure it rocks. i will let you know when i have. get it!
-----
# cd /
Imagine a utility that would convert your docs to a crossplatform (*NIX, MacOS, Win32) information container - one that would allow true device and platform independance, as well as allow internal and external hyperlinking, presentation-style slideshows, full Unicode support, and it should be an open standard.
What would this magic format be called? PDF, maybe?
There is already at least one OSS engine for directly creating PDF without using any Adobe products, either:ReportLab
Call me a luddite, but I'm not certain what YAFF will provide in the long run, other than splintering the non-.DOC users further. Adobe may be an evil, greedy, closed-source corporation, but PDF as a file spec is open and documented. Also current viewer products have no troubles (that I've seen) with much older versions of the file format. PDF allows for indexing of documents for fast searches, bookmark creation for a table of contents/index, thumbnail creation for quick navigation, granular document security (allow some/none/all modification), and can be entirely self contained (supports RLE, LZW and JPEG encoding for embedded graphics), allowing a PDF to look the same anywhere it is viewed and be easily transferrable.
Disclaimer: I distribute everything in PDF. My resume, invoices, proposals and other similar things. The only problem I have is trying to be polite when people ask why I don't use Word.
PS: anyone who feels that PDAs are a limiting factor in the use of PDF - huh? They're grand for PIM/phone/GPS/GameBoy functionality, but who really wants to slog through a tech ref manual (or equiv.) on the thing? I'm honestly curious, not trying to flame.
QA implies some kind of quality to begin with.
I'm not sure why you include LaTeX in this list. I'm not sure which, LaTeX or XML, would be best for the proposed use, but LaTeX most certainly *is* readable even without a `parser.' The other aspects of XML and LaTeX are where the two formats differ but both are designed as structured markup saved in ASCII.
--Ben
Did XML kidnap your cat?
No, if you want to think about using XML for this, you need to talk about the DTD, not XML itself.
I think it's safe to assume that defining a DTD was implied. It's simply easier to say "Use XML" than to say "Write a good DTD to use with XML".
So, the question becomes, which DTD? In order to compete with the competition(LaTeX, HTML, PostScript)
That's just the point. It doesn't need to compete with other formats. The process goes something like this: Write a good DTD that fulfills all your needs, and allows for easy extension and specialization later on. Then, write XSL for exporting the format to whatever other formats are useful. HTML obviously for web display, PostScript for printing, maybe one for PDF, even. (Though encouraging the use of PDF probably isn't any better than encouraging the use of Word's DOC)
it has to be: device-independant, easily rendered, easily edited, and extremely comprehensive.
How could it possibly be device-dependent? This is just text, we're talking about.
Easy rendering has nothing to do with the XML DTD or document, that's the responsibility of the XSL that would accompany it, or the application that parses the document.
Easy editing is pretty straightforward. Just edit it. This goes along with comprehensive. A good DTD can be comprehensive, but it can also leave room for extension without breaking that document. It is, after all, the extensible markup language.
Don't shout "XML!!". XML, without a DTD, is almost useless, especially for this application. The DTD has to be all those things I mentioned, plus(for this application), it needs to be standard.
I wouldn't say XML without a DTD is useless, but I will say XML without a DTD is silly. It's a simple, logical assumption that if you're writing XML documents, they should have a DTD, so you know what's allowed. Like I said before, it seems like this would be implied.
Microsoft
Matt Barnson
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
MacPerl documentation comes in a format called "pod", which to me looks like a markup formatting language. I don't know how many platforms support it and and how powerful it is, but it always seems to work for MacPerl documentation.
My two favorites: Rich Text Format (.rtf) and HTML. HTML has obvious advantages, but the disadvantage that it really wasn't designed for word processing as such. RTF was a format that, I believe, DEC came up with as a software-independent storage format for word-processor documents. I've found it does most everything needed to keep formatting and such intact, it's readable and writeable by most WP software ( MSWord, WordPerfect and StarOffice that I've confirmed by use ). It's also a plain-ASCII format, if you've no word processor you can pull it up in a text editor and get at the actual text if you really have to. And it hasn't had changes made to it in many years, stability is a definite plus for a long-term storage format.
Sure, and from .txt you can trivially create .rtf and not vice-versa. To be even more extreme it's easy to convert from .txt to .png, difficult to convert from .png to .txt, but that's no reason to start distribution textual descriptions in lieu of pictures, because they are suited to entirely different things. I take your final point, but the supporting argument is irrelevant.
You might want to investigate XML, with a suitable DTD, e.g. DocBook for technical manuals. Also, SVG is an XML-based format for vector graphics, which always seemed to be the point at which SGML-based efforts had trouble.
Tool support for this combination may not be so good or inexpensive, but you can be fairly sure the content will survive and be usable in many different environments.
The other principal difference is that TeX can typeset a formula that looks the way you would want a formula to look if someone with very good handwriting wrote it. Word can't even come close.
Wouldn't XML do this job? (speaking as one who doesn't know to much about same?)
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I meant that it's not editable by mere mortals. It's a perfectly good language, but it's not intended to be hand-coded by document authors. How many people do you know who actually hand-code documents in postscript ?
Seriously, how can anyone consider anything diffrent from LaTeX for serious writing (unless they have a publisher with trained monkies to rewrite it in TeX)? Hyperlinks are the ONLY feature missing from LaTeX, but LaTeX is about the only system with a good clean way to handle the old fassion hyperlinks (i.e. index, figure numbering, etc.).
.eps and .jpg, the TeX macro would embed the .eps and the URL for the .jpg into the dvi, the dvi could be converted into both .ps and .html without loosing the pictures. There are some issues regardling the placment of the images when convered to HTML, but nothing a LaTeX hacker could not fix.
The point is that you must use LaTeX if you want your work to ever appear respectable in print, so the question is: dose your publisher want to TeX it themselves from your draft or do they want you to TeX it, i.e. it's a question of money. If your an autonomous institution which dose it's own publishing and dose not have ass loads of money then you really need to make people TeX it.
Now, there are SGML systems which produce TeX and HTML, but they may not handle pictures propperly, so you should be very careful. Actually, there are ways to include hyperlinks in LaTeX. The resulting dvi file can be compiled to an HTML file. This is almost shurly the very best way to typeset your documents since you can write a TeX macro to treat images propperly for conversion to postscript OR HTML. It would work something like this: your images would be compiled to both
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
How about DocBook? It's cross-platform and it is structure based, not presentation based. From a docbook source, you can render to various presentation formats (html, ps, rtf). The only problem I have been having with it is finding a nice authoring tool.
It had a one paper deactivation energy for me. The tool I was using was so bad the word LaTeX still leaves a bad taste in my mouth (press about 5 keys in succession to get a subscript, worse than tekken :) )
This was about 7 years ago though, maybe the tools are better now?
stay frosty and alert
XML is pretty verbose and ugly. It's not the most convenient format to type in. But, in some sense, it finally extends the traditional UNIX approach to more complex data types. UNIX used to give you scanf, printf, and plain text files with fields. XML now extends that to parsing, generating, and transforming tree-structured types. That's really great, and it is really useful.
Where TeX falls way short is in the way it is programmed and extended. The TeX processor is more like a machine language, with registers, lots of side effects, hooks, and global variables. Doing non-trivial transformations in TeX is incredibly hard, and even the best macro packages often don't get it quite right.
XML's approach is both more modern and much simpler: you describe transformations on the parse tree. XSLT and XSLT:FO are what corresponds to the programmable guts of TeX.
Most likely, what is going to happen is that many documents will be authored in XML, many document styles will be described in XSLT and XML Schema, and TeX will be used not for defining macro packages, but merely for performing the last stages of physical layout.
Hi,
;) Our DOC exporter currently exports something that looks like DOC at about 10 paces - i.e. it's not really DOC format, but it's getting there.
I'm a maintainer/lead coder on a couple of OS Office Projects: AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com) and wvWare (www.wvware.com). I've written quite a few import/export filters for AbiWord.
AbiWord is an excellent OS word processor which already handles lots of existing formats that you speak of: DOC, XHTML, DBK, RTF, et. al.... They each have their own mertits, advantages, and disadvantages.
XHTML is not a good layout language. It has all of the same problems that HTML and thus web pages have: i.e. WYSISYG formatting is next to impossible to achieve.
DBK is nice, except that DBK wasn't really meant to be a WP file format. Its tags carry with them lots of semantic information that WPs generally just don't care about. Its layout tags leave much to be desired for a WP. There just isn't a clean mapping of DBK->WP tags.
RTF is really slick (even though it is kinda old). Basically, anything that the AbiWord format can represent, RTF can do. This is a really good choice for your format.
ABW (or your WP's favorite native format) is always nice because it maps neatly onto your feature-set.
DOC support isn't really all that bad anymore. If you know what wvWare is (if you don't, see www.wvware.com), you know that it can convert DOC files into just about any format that you'd like. It can do this through either the command-line version of through the 50KB associated library. AbiWord uses wv to import DOCs. The importer is about 1100 LOC. I'm currently also writing DOC export support into wvWare (and thus AbiWord). Our DOC importer is *significantly* better than the one that OO has released. That will probably change soon, since Sun hired wvware's ex-maintainer to work on OO
Anyway, hope that this helps,
Dom
Framemaker speaks it, WordPerfect speaks it, I dunno about MS Word, and of course it can be pumped out into lots of other formats (eg HTML, XML, etc.)
It's not a perfect solution but it's widely availiable and fairly future-proof. Your specs should be about content anyway, let the reader concern themselves with presentation.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
There's a running joke at my office on my constant threats to start doing all wordprocessing in HTML, because MS Word crashes, eats documents and/or corrupts them irrecoverably so often with me.
For a serious standard, I think we should support HTML but only as a subset of SGML (read: SGML would provide the standard, HTML would be used by us lazy asses, but would be supported within the standard)
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
And then you make the same error as you pointed out yourself. (Quite rightful, I have to add.)
The DTD buys you nothing if you don't have applications that support it. And it's not a function of the DTD that it is easily rendered or easily edited. That's the problem with available programs.
While rendering is readily available for a large class of DTDs today, editors are still the big bummer. There are simply no high-quality XML editors for non-technical types that have a reasonable price-tag and are available on a large number of platforms. (Technical types may and will use (X)Emacs+psgml-mode, or simply vi.)
Sad, but that's the way it is.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
The advantages of using cross-platform and implementation independent standards are three fold:
1) XML separates your content (XML) from your structure (DTD) from your presentation (XSL) leading to far more concise and rational documents.
2) They are open standards, unlike Word, FrameMaker or other proprietary formats.
3) The tools for document creation are open (and closed,) cross-platform and not dependent on the largesse of any single source.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I vote for HTML. Yes, it isn't great for fine layout control, but you don't *NEED* perfect layout control. We're writing standards specs here, not doing graphic design.
.gif/.png/.jpg, and read by most browsers.
The advantages: HTML is readable on any platform under the sun (and quite a few in caves), and most word processors can export using it.
If the documents have figures, they can be saved as one of
This is the only way I've found to get MS Word-users to give me readable documents, among other things.
What the average Joe needs is something that saves the structure as XML markup, the formatting as CSS, and bundles both as a single file that starts with the XML text, follows with a delimiter, then the CSS rules, another delimiter, then XSLT schemas, another delimiter, any embeded images MIME-encoded and separated with additional delimiters.
To make this whole technical twist completely transparent to the end-user, the word processor itself is GUI-based and duplicates all Word functions in ever aspect: location of menus, layout of the toolbar, etc. and the end-user doesn't even know that his document's content is broken down in sevral parts before being tarballed into a single file; everything remains transparent and so much like using Word that the end-user becomes a Linux-happy camper.
--
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
PS is not very editable, but excelent to archive documents (PDF).
Maybe I've missed something, but if the content is stored in XML and several XSL templates are provided for output, 'bit rot' goes away as well as closed solutions.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
DocBook is your friend
DocBook is a lot to digest at one time, but it is well worth the effort. Personally I prefer DocBook XML and use Norm Walsh's XSLT stylesheets to transform the XML to anything I want... HTML, PDF, whatever.
Here are some resources for your reading pleasure.
DocBook is Open Source, freely available on all platforms of interest, can be used for simple documents to complex books, separates presentation from content, and is extensible. What more could you want from a document format?
Ah... but CR or LF or both? The eternal question....
Postscript. You can get programs to read it free for any OS, it's device independent, ANYTHING can render into it, and it gives you supurb control over the content of your document. It is truly the lowest common denominator.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you need different fonts and graphics to get an idea approved, perhaps the idea wasn't that good to begin with, or perhaps you're working with schmucks.
** http://www.stinkingloser.com **
I think the best way to store your documents in some sort of XML application, either using one of the predefined applications or designing one that fits your needs yourself.
<P>
The advantages are obvious:
<UL>
<LI>XML is plain text and can be read by anyone even without knowledge of XML</LI>
<LI>XML is structure-carrying data; the data itself is carrying the information on how it is structured;
<LI>XML is standardized; there are numerous applications that can use the data, e.g. search engines or query languages, transformations, editors
<LI>XML documents can be easily transformed to any other document type using XSLT. This includes HTML and PDF
</UL>
Sebastian
Your examples really aren't relevant in this case. Firstly, it's actually easier for an automated process to generate text from RTF than the other way round, since the RTF document must include additional mark-up. Your second example is even further from the mark - you obviously can't create the required PNG file from a text file (or not easily), so it's not a good storage mechanism. However, given a well-defined XML document structure it becomes trivial to use XSL to transform it into a LaTeX document representing the same data, or an HTML document, or some other custom format. And XML is intended to be used for this very purpose.
I've actually been through this process at work - we shifted from using a proprietary file format for our invoices to using an XML representation which can then be used to generate a range of views, from HTML for viewing on the intranet to LaTeX for printing and sending to customers. It's a great solution, and it means that we're not tied down to using LaTeX - at a later stage we can change to another document format, and all that needs to be changed is the XSL document for all of our invoices to be available in the new format. If the documents were originally stored in LaTeX format, we would not be able to do this - a change in the output format would require all the invoices to be re-entered (as was the case when we switched *from* the first proprietary format) or a large amount of custom code to be written.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
...but I think XML is the clear answer here. XML is already very mature, can be used in a number of situations, and can incorporate more than just text.
You can even embed binary data in an XML document (with a tiny bit of creativity) for all those people who like to populate their files with custom fonts, clipart, graphs, etc. (This is accomplished through something, say... <BINARY CLIPART><DATA>[image data]</DATA></BINARY CLIPART>. You get the idea.)
How about special configuration parameters? You could incorporate tags that would handle the way a document is viewed by different people ("are you a techie, marketing drone, webbie, etc" -> certain data becomes visible).
The biggest advantages here are obviously the standards provided by XML (thank you W3C). It's uses are broad. It's got high quality interpreters on ALL platforms (especially JAXP for Java - it's a joy to work with *g*).
The only standards we'd really have to focus on would be which tags would be considered "key" tags.
What else do you need? Doesn't OpenOffice already use XML as it's standard document type?
Sure I could be wrong on this, so don't berate me too much. I've just had a lot of positive experience working with XML for sooo many different applications.
and editable was one of the requirements.
At the university writing lab where I "work" (well, they pay me, and sometimes I do things that involve effort), students are constantly bringing in Word documents that they can't open. There's a million reasons. They wrote it in Works. They took the disk out while the Word had the file open. Or the #1 reason: they wrote it in Word 2000. So they tour the university computer labs in search of something that will open their document. They try Word 97 on our machines, Word 2000 on the ones upstairs, different Word 2000 on the NT boxes in the engineering building. It goes on and on. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Often I try to convince the English department to teach their students to use something more compatible, like HTML or RTF. There is little demand for images and tables, and when there is it is really part of a Powerpoint sedative or spreadsheet. But they always say, we have to use Word because it is the standard. Meaning that it is the universally compatible format that everyone can read. Now am I just crazy here? Don't answer that. If Word were in fact any kind of standard, why do we have the Tower of Babel with all these incompatible Word documents? Word may be the standard word processor, but there is no standard Word format. There are a dozen different Word formats.
Everyone might as well use whatever weird word processor they like, and pass along a second copy in plain text every time they try to move the document to antother machine. The net effect would be the same.
Lasts hundreds of years, and OCR scanning keeps getting better and better.
is it the guy doc out of LOVE BOAT now? or doc holliday maybe? the alternative is getting the fucken work done or complaining about how your tools are broken. FUCK! if you guys are so bloody intelligent that you can just 'be in charge of DDR' and shit like that, you'd think you could just switch to PS or PDF format and QUIT YOUR WHINING.
:::
:::
Vaginux.
"eat me".
Use AbiWord. It compiles in Windows and in many UNIX flavors. It file format it's XML, and it's a light WP.
-- Arturo Tena
Actually, another difference is H&J--hyphenation & justification. Loosely speaking, TeX does its H&J by trying out different ways of breaking a paragraph into lines and filling it, assigning each way a "badness" score, and choosing the way with the least badness. The result is H&J that looks rather nice and seldom has ugly gaps between words or too many words scrunched together. WYSIWYG document processors do their H&J on the fly, which means they *can't* do things like try out different ways of breaking a paragraph and so on, so it doesn't always look as good.
I ran into this at work last year. We let people submit to us as DOC/WPD/PS (PS usually come from LaTeX) and we convert them all into PDF. There is an Acrobat reader for Win32/MacOS/Linux/Solaris etc etc. It has served us very well, as there is already a cross platform suite of tools available, and it allows for embedding graphics with text (which was a huge concern for us).
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
How do you embed graphics, usable independent spreadsheet imports, audio among other things required for presentation / documents.
XML might be great for text but keeping binary data in it isn't the best of plans. Size being the other issue, but if always saved / restored with gzip or something...
Rod Taylor
"If you want near-WYSIWYG editing tools, TeX/LaTeX is only a good choice if you stay in UNIX, since there are no good near-WYSIWYG editing tools (that I know of) for MAC, and perhaps not even for Windows."
For Windows, there's "Scientific Word" at http://www.mackichan.com/.
Use markup only if it's necessary for semantic meaning (this is a chapter, this is a paragraph). In that case, I recommend DocBook. Otherwise, plain old ASCII will do the trick just fine. Many people think that bold, italics, and bullets are necessary when writing anything, even a simple email. Use words to make a point, not bullets.
Transcript show: self sigs atRandom.
I keep on hearing about the superior aesthetics of LaTex versus MS Word/WYSIWYG. The principle difference seems to be that WSIWYG allows sloppy organization while LaTex has fairly rigid templates which forces you to structure your thoughts for readability and useability. It would be helpful to see PDF output comparing the appearance of the the two different approaches. One comparison could be to take identical raw text and numerical data of an academic nature and give it to an MS Word academic document expert and also to a LaTex academic document expert and see which output is superior. Can't seem to find any examples in Google. Has anyone done this yet?
You shouldnt have to worry about the standards outliving TeX - Donald Knuth designed it what that in mind.
TeX (and the LaTeX frontend) runs on about as many platforms as linux.
the output of a tech document is quite frankly spectacular. you just dont get this kind of quality with the word processing programs that are out there today.
many people thing the learning curve high, but this isn't necessarly so. my advisor says that LaTeX has a one paper activation energy. ie it takes you about one document to learn most of what you need to know to get things done... and once you use it you will find it hard to use anything else in the future.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
One good thing about RTF, is that you could simply ignore tags that you didn't recognize.
A modern-day RTF based on UTF-8 would be dandy.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
IIRC there's a version of framemaker that supports SGML. In any case, I agree with the people who say that some SGML/XML DTD should be used. (btw, going with sgml was the smartest thing the LDP did ...)
Quite simply, RTF is easy to parse, it's human-readable with a plain ASCII text editor, and so on.
It was *very* easy for people to write apps that were compatible with RTF, so of course MicroSquish abandoned it for an unpublished binary format.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."