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RMS: Putting an End to Word Attachments
sombragris writes "I've spotted in NewsForge a very interesting editorial by none other than RMS himself on the subject of getting rid of those annoying MS Word attachment that people send. The essay is worth thinking and doubtless worth implementing." I've found that KWord and Abiword both did a fine job of reading Word files - it's the being able to Save As Word where things get messy.
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it
Most Word users, I expect, want to write letters to their mothers, not recompile the application.
Hogsback
Whatever you think of microsoft, .doc has become a de facto document standard, like .pdf. Pitting open source software against .doc risks marginalization. Maybe the effort should go into producing a good, free implementation of a document editor to produce .doc documents, thereby using .doc against microsoft?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Oh I long for the days when XML will be used for all file formats, and the universe will be whole........
While often I agree with him, half the time I can't stand the way he browbeats you with how wrong you are. I think this article was well-written and reasonable...
Scary. =)
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
What does RMS have against MS Word? (sarcasm, people)
Honestly, the people that attach word docs are usually the people that give you a blank stare when you say words like 'linux' and 'unix'. They're the people that work in accounting and marketing that only know how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Exchange.
If you write a polite reply, asking them (usually putting in instructions) to cut-and-paste the word doc into exchange, and send it in normal text, and an explanation why, they usually comply.
Honestly, what does RMS expect to accomplish with this editorial?
The people that read it don't send word attachments anyway.
Going in and telling people to "Stop sending documents in Word!" Is not giving people the 'choice' on what wordprocessor to use. Isn't he supposed to support the 'choice', or just his idea??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Don't you mean ascii txt? ;)
Hopefully we can show enough people that the complexity of Word is very rarely used. Maybe mass installations of the windows version of vim will help :)
I think what is required is mass education... every time some nitnoid sends you an Email with a Word document attached, and nothing in the Word document but text, respond! Don't just shake your head, think "what an idiot", and read it... respond to the Email!
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
How can we get rid of Word attachments without incurring the wrath or Bernie Shifman? If he can't send out his resume, he'll probably sue...
I just read the article. Now that is out right wishful thinking. Let's see, if I was to reply with his examples to messages containing Word attachments my boss would tell me to find another company to work for:)
A couple of points:
1. There are plenty of Office Suites out there that understand the Word Format. (StarOffice and Koffice to name two.)
2. Microsoft has already stated they are switching to the non-proprietary XML format for their standard document format.
3. While I do like GPL and Freeware I also believe that we need to have comercialware. Let's see, if all software was free then why would anyone in their right mind want to spend money to study programming at a an instituion? Why get a degree in software engineering?
Yeah, KWord works halfassed with .doc, but I can't get it to read an .rtf for the life of me. This is unfortunate because I believe that .rtf would work a lot better for getting formatting and such correct.
Many Open Source applications don't come with binaries for windows.
I know I can compile the app, but my grandmother can't.
If there is a wonderful new open-source document format, it's still useless if (for idealogical reasons) the editor isn't available on Windows.
Hogsback
What, you mean completely ignored?
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
When I heard that Word would support saving to HTML I was very happy. Then I saw the HTML that was output and was depressed again. Dreamweaver does have a neat feature - "clean up Word HTML" which makes them a little more acceptable, but it is a nightmare to edit in HTML anything that was generated in Word.
It's a shame, as XHTML and CSS allows for very clean separation of content from presentation... maybe someday they will hit critical mass and it will be the accepted form of "rich" content presentation. But for now I have to slog through RTF, Word, Powerpoint (ugh) and Excel documents that are not converted cleanly to the office suites on Linux.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Isn't PDF a secret format too, eventhough there are readers for linux?
It's "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator "
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
Is not giving people the 'choice' on what wordprocessor to use
No, nobody is arguing the fact they can't use Word, The issue is they are forcing a "choice" on the receiver, by sending the Doc format. If MS opened the Doc formats and perfect filters were available then Maybe you have a point.
Help fight continental drift.
It may be easy (as he says) to convert doc to html, but you can lose formatting. Auto-numbered lists, especially, seem to get munged in the conversion.
Best Slashdot Co
You don't need email with Word attachments. The problem is having such a format be so widespead that it interferes with normal communication, like email. I am a UNIX network engineer that has been bitten *many* times by the 'please send a resume as a Word doc'. That is difficult if you don't run Windows at all.
Though I generally feel RMS isn't an effective speaker, he definitely has a point here. Honestly, do people really need Word for the majority of text documents? Is everyone sending emails with tabular, image-embedded documents? I think not.
I'm glad he mentioned html and txt formats, but why pdf? Aren't pdfs more bloated than docs? This is of course refering to his example 3.
I work in a mostly MS shop. I use linux primarilly.
Staroffice or OpenOffice are perfect for working with most MS-Office Docs, Word compatibility is 100%, as well as their spreadsheet program (sorry Gnumeric)
when the 6.0 final release is out, i personally feel that it's a best bet for working in a MS shop.
-h
--- #@$DF@#2%@^%3^&*$%FRHG%%[NO CARRIER]
I don't think that calling Word "a secret proprietary format" (true as it may be) will make much sense to the average Windows user.
A more general issue is that all of the examples provided are political in nature.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
Educating people about the political issues surrounding proprietary document formats isn't always appropriate in a business situation. If I need to ask a customer to use a format other than Word, I also need to be able to do it in a non-alienating way. I think that Stallman offers some good suggestions, but the specific examples he provides wouldn't work well in some social contexts.
This was an interesting editorial, but the thought that kept going through my head was why?
Why ask people to change away from something THEY are comfortable with? Why ask a casual user to use a feature in Word that they probably don't know how to use? (The Save As option - most people don't know it's there, or what it does).
What is the normal tool used for creating text documents - Word. Right or wrong, it's there. A sophisticated user probably understands the optiosn available, and the audience of their message and chooses an appropriate format. A casual user, which is the majority of users, doesn't care, doesn't WANT to care, and more importantly, SHOULDN'T care about the format.
These people want to share something they have. They don't want to have to learn a new program or feature to do it - they just want it to happen.
If I send something out in a Word document, there's probably a good reason for it. Getting a reply back from someone that says "Please send this in another format" is not going to endear that person to me. I don't really worry about whether that person PREFERS a certain format or not - after all, if they sent that reply to me, they don't care what I might prefer.
-- Ravensre
"But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion"
I use Abiword to save to Word format all the time, and have never had a problem. Since Version 0.95 came out, that is. Also has lots of other niphty features. My wife and my godmother both stick to Word like postage stamps, but I use of AbiWord has never hampered my communicating with them.
You are not the customer.
Instead of getting on your soapbox about Word files, a much more productive approach would be to support the development and extensive testing of import filters for Word files. I have a lot of experience in this area, and I can tell you without hesitation that correctly importing Word files of arbitrary complexity is a far more difficult task than even most programmers know. The Word format has got to be one of the most Byzantine file formats ever created, especially when you start adding embedded or linked graphics.
I just cut and pasted the email reply suggestions into MSWord. Now how do I send it out?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
... until you can provide me with an alternative. Windows 2000, MS Office, and Eudora meet my needs quite well; I tried Star Office about a year ago, and based on that experience I'm not going to try again very soon.
Rant and rave all you like about "free software", "open standards", and "GNU/linux", but I have work to do.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
As one who has felt this same way for many years, I wish I thought it would work.
If it weren't sad, it would be humorous: we have folks who maintain Lotus Notes databases with various internal policies and it was like pulling teeth to get them to stop attaching their policies as Word docs. Notes, of course, can't index or search their text now and that was the only way I got them to stop - I proved that their new addition was invisible to anyone searching for it.
Sadly, I've capitulated - I have Word on my home peecee - and don't think there's much we can do to stop this other than pray that they convert Word's format to xml (not that I'm gonna hold my breath, but MS does seem to looooove xml!).
Mark
That is, it should be possible to read and edit the same document with different open-source tools [since there is no chance that we all use the same] without loosing neither text, nor formatting or meta information (like indexes, cross-references, review marks etc...).
Ciao
----
FB
i work in a very microsoft-oriented company, with windows and office everywhere. however, i use staroffice/openoffice for word processing and creating/editing spreadsheets. in my experience, staroffice's filters for ms word and ms excel are excellent. i have yet to be given a complex spreadsheet that i could not open with staroffice, change, and save as an excel file.
Life is short; think quickly.
I just want to drive, not mess with the engine. That doesn't mean I'd accept a car with a locked hood that could only be opened by the dealer.
There's a very simple way of changing MS-Word's default format to something other than .doc format. I use Word a fair bit, and my copy is set to automatically save everything in rich text format. I have yet to encounter ANY formatting that can't be saved in that format. (Maybe because I don't write Macro viruses).
.rtf documents seamlessly. (It just treats them like regular .doc files). Don't forget to explain that occaisionally the system will complain that "some formatting might be lost", but that's not really true. It's only the very strange formatting that no one ever uses that would be lost. This has been good enough for all the non-technical people I've explained this to.
Explain to people that if they do this, their documents can be read by MANY more people, and that it doesn't affect them at all because MS-Word can read
.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
One of the reasons
Letting people know that we can't view a document isn't a bad idea. Letting people know that they may not need a full-blown processor just to type a few notes isn't a bad idea either.
Most of our secretarial force now has only an HTML based Word Processor.
Biggest problem: there's no good way to handle tabbing (tables are fine but inconvenient, anything more fancy like auto-resizing spans screw up). Secretaries like being able to quickly due dot-lead tabs and such to make quick columns. HTML as implemented in IE (which we have to support so clients can view documents), doesn't have good enough tabs.
The other problem (no good concept of page, which makes documents for printing hard to edit), we've been able to solve (well enough for us) in our custom editor.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
As this article notes, if you store your data in a propriatary format, the vendor of the software in essence owns your document. You're locked into the upgrade cycle. There ought to be a law that government and universities be foreced to use data formats based on open standards.
I've read the title too quick, and for a moment I thought Good Old Rick had decided to go all way and become a desert hermit, as in "RMS: Putting an End to World Attachments"
there are a number of others out there as well that can do the same job.
maybe richard stallman should get off his high-horse of accusing users like my mother, who know no better, of being an inconvenient nusance. and integrate some conversion tool with procmail or something.
so an email comes through, you check the attachment mime type, you see its a .doc. you take the file, run it through the conversion utility and rewrite the mail body using an .HTML attachment.
there problem solved.
i'm sorry but there is no way that a minority of linux users can convert the majority of windows users to change the way they work.
I've found that KWord and Abiword both did a fine job of reading Word files - it's the being able to Save As Word where things get messy.
.doc files, you'd go through hell working without MS Word. The 2 word processors do a fine job with thier own formats, but .doc is still unusable.
Not me, I've had a horrible time trying to get Abiword and Kword to display my files correctly. If you're working with a lot of
A friend of mine e-mailed the monopolies and merger commision (UK body designed to make sure no company abuses there monopoly) regarding what he belived was unfair use of videopluss codes
How did the impartial, UK government monopolies commision reply to his e-mail?
You guessed it
In propriatry M$ word format!!!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
He quickly changed the greeting to a .TXT
Later, on my advice, he made it an .RTF so he could font & format. This created sufficient confusion among other recipients that he had to change it back.
When they reply with a "huh?" then I share some of my views on proprietary and non-standard text formats and suggest RTF when sharing docs with others. With simpler users, I'll just simplify, explaining that "RTF is the form you use when emailing documents, DOC is mostly meant for local editing before you 'publish' by printing or saving in a public format."
Until they experience the annoyance of unavailable or cyrptic data first hand, most folks will write you off as a quack for complaining. They just can't imagine a world where e-mail attachments don't open nicely so long as you know how to double-click.
That would be great if you could edit it, or even compose it without a piece of software that costs hundreds of dollars...
second society
That's just the opposite of my experience with StarOffice. I've opened .doc files from the network, with "track changes" enabled, edited them in StarOffice Writer, and then saved them. None of my coworkers were ever the wiser.
I also print a lot of homework at work. I've saved my files as Word 2000 files, opened them on Word 2000, and printed without a problem.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
This is a meaningless point. The fact that a specific subset of users, however large, cannot get at the source has no bearing on its importance. Even though I personally can look at and understand [some] source, I would never be able to look at it all. The value is that I know that there are multiple people looking at and improving the source that I'm not looking at, and doing it from an end-user perspective, not a software-producer perspective. I may not be a kernel hacker, but someone else with my hardware is, and I benefit from the improvements he or she makes to the kernel. "I don't recompile applications" is not a reason to not use open source software.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Its really two situations. Both parties can read text while both parties may not be able to read
That said, Stallman is proposing a particularly counterproductive way to go about it. When I receive a file I can't open, I send a polite message to the effect of, "I can't read that file format. Please save the file in RTF format (Select "Save As.." from the File menu, and then choose Rich Text) and resend it. In the future, please send me files that way, so I'll be able to open them right away."
That has the advantages of a) not confusing the secretary or supplier who doesn't even know that there are different file formats with some political rant about Kenya, the Microsoft monopoly, bytes and freedom, b) doesn't convince a more knowledgeable recipient that Linux users are rabid, socially dysfunctional loons and c) is the way a decent human being behaves.
Richard Stallman probably doesn't realize that when the rest of us receive a Word attachment, it's not from a reporter seeking our views on Free Software and appreciating his tantrums as a little added color for his article, it's from a coworker just doing what any normal computer user does.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Maybe it's just my perverse sense of humor, but I really wish I had some vital document that he couldn't live without, just so I could send it to him Word format.
And then refuse to provide another format.
Look, like it or not, Word has become a standard for business, just as Photoshop is a standard in the graphic design industry. It's going to take more than just politics and wishful thinking to change it. When a format arises that provides more capability than the Word format, then start talking replacement.
Until then, there's plenty of other brick walls to ram your head against.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
So what's the best format if you're going to avoid Word. Recently I've started using .rtf for sending files that are too complicated for .txt, but what else is out there?
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
This is an issue that effects more that just those people using GNU/Linux. Our office used WordPerfect (form Corel at the moment) but we are slowly being forced to move to Word because it was named as the CA state standard for document exchange. I won't go into everything I don't like about Word but the lack of reveal codes and picture placement issues are a major problem.
The real problem is that "No one ever got fired for choosing MS" (recent IIS issues not withstanding) therefore MS can sell the least effective wordprocessor on the market and still have a >50% market share.
Normally I tend to think that RMS's writing are a bit extreme. This time I can agree whole heartedly and without reservation.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
..."they" zipped their word files before sending them... ;-)
no way.
Acorn User will be happy to use !AntiWord to convert these into formatted text, at least. (BTW, it works on most platforms
Trolling using another account since 2005.
You know, I understand that RMS is trying to get at the root cause of the problem, but if he spent just a little more time promoting open source applications that can handle the Word docs instead of trashing the Word docs themselves, he'd be doing a lot more good than he'd realize. Face it: Word's "Save" icon saves documents as Word documents. Going from "Save" to "Save As..." and chosing a file type ("what's a file type?!") is a pain in the ass for many people. We should be trying to make life easier for others, not complicating their lives in order to make ours easier, particularly when it's a question of one extra step that needs to be applied on either end. Abiword, KWord, and a bunch of other applications are out there busting their ass trying to handle things like doc importing. Maybe RMS should spend a little more time applauding these groups instead of constantly being a naysayer. Or, he can keep doing as he likes, and realize that he's only serving to marginalize himself more and more...
Not good, not goot at all.
Yes it can be very unpleasant when you really need a document and you go to the website to get it and send it as fast you can and you find out that there is only a doc verson. I happen to me a few times but I had the really nice experience to be an hour ago in a site where i really needed its form and there were two versions, a doc and a rtf ( explicity for unix boxes). It was a nice surprise.
It shows that even gov departments can be flexible and open minded.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
Before you give up on StarOffice, wait for v6 to be released or try the OpenOffice betas. Once StarOffice hits that wonderful .0 release I intend to get most of the people I know using it.
I agree with RMS, but I doubt that his arguments will convince anyone who's not already convinced.
We could try pushing some fear buttons instead: tell them that their e-mail was rejected for security reasons (or even as "a possible virus attack"), because Word attachments often carry viruses, and to please resend in plain text. The word "virus" is needed, even if not entirely technically accurate, because that's the one people know.
Another good idea ruined by Stallman's egocentric GNU rantings. Should .doc's be the de facto standard they seemed to be today? Absolutely not, and everyone who uses them should realize the inherent bias .doc's create.
.docs ignorant and to use scare tactics about how these files are in some witchy "secret" file format that can contain hidden personal information isn't educating people either. It's playing on the same naivety that made them succumb to using .docs at the outset! Furthermore, Stallman refuses to even use open source software (like the excellent aforementioned AbiWord) to read the file's content, which is hardly the way to begin a dialog.
.doc attachments), he's worried about closed standards. This is a good point. But instead of preaching that pdf is the answer (a paradigm shift for Word users), offer good alternatives.
.docs into .rtf when .docs are opened and creates new .rtf files, not .docs, when a user creates a new file.
.docs and save to formats Word users still understand.
But to "politely" call those who use
Stallman's not worried about secret file formats (which he should drop from those silly email replies about
* Write a vba script for Word that turns
* Suggest that they use AbiWord, something that can read
Stallman is, imo, no better than Microsoft in that he has great ideas wrung through a strange, self-serving translator that mangles the original, useful message. In MS's case, it's a profit maximization machine. In Stallman's, it's GNU. Both biases serve to dilute what could have been a well-received and useful technology or lesson, and this Word scare is another one.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Several companies I've done buisness with in the past have refused anything other than plain text or html. But not for political or idiological reasons... hey did so for security reasons.
MS has blown their own leg off with this over bloated do everything format because now more and more buisnesses are blocking all potential virus entries into their systems.
RMS' rant was redundant if nothing else.
Sometimes I think the open source comunity should just shut up and let MS do it's own talking. People will learn on their own why depending on Microsoft is a problem.
I think that we need to start pushing the idea of a "Public Utility" with both the Operating system and file formats! With the government case against MS, I keep hearing the notion of forcing MS write the Office suite for Linux and I cringe....The courts will not impose that on MS...and pushing for that can only lead to dissapointment when it fails.....but perhaps they would force the .doc, .xls, and other formats open!
Force MS to document the formats (not the source for Office, just the file formats) and force them to keep the formats open. They could switch to other formats if they wish, but they would have to document those too and must provide the option to "save as" the regulated "Public utility" format.
This is no different than a "Public Utility".....the same as current power generation and transmission equipment...Could you imagine what would happen if electricity were a "Propriatary format" and each company was allowed to make "different" electricity?
These things are regulated for the public good, and so should basic file formats. These are just too important to trust to the marketing whims of one company.
Really, Word is a decent package for document collaboration. There might be better tools out there, but none so universally accepted and used. It might suffer from featureitis, but don't think it's only useful for pictures and tables.
At work we have Windows with Office and I get nonetheless annoyed when anyone sends me a Word attachment that they could have simply typed into Outlook as regular text and been on their way. The exception to this rule would be really large documents that are ready for final printing on paper, but it is rare to send that through email.
So my pet peeve is anyone that adds another layer of complexity for no reason whatsoever when regular email works just fine.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I love Stallman's " polite reply" suggestions. #1 was blunt; #2 was preachy, and #3 was downright sarcastic/annoying.
:-)
Oh, wait, all three(four?) describe RMS
Seriously, half the problem is that we've got this guy, who has NO tact or social skills, as one of the most visible "lobbyists"...when asking people to do something aside from their set routine, you MUST be VERY tactful and polite...
On the otherhand, pushing Microsoft to use public standards might get serious consideration, instead of plain old "You're smoking crack."
Just a thought. I doubt MS would actually use XML, but stranger things could happen.
excellent point, I couldn't have said it better myself.
In fact, I believe that if you rename an RTF file so that it has the .DOC extension, it will appear to Windows users to be a normal Word document. Opening it will launch Word, which handles the file without complaining. This can be a useful trick for sending to recipients who require .doc files. You shouldn't abuse it too much, because it will inconvenience non-Word users who can deal better with RTF than DOC.
...until you can provide me with an alternative. Mandrake, StarOffice and KMail meet my needs quite well; I tried MS Word about a year ago, and based on that experience I'm not going to try again very soon.
Rant and rave all you like about "you get what you pay for", "company's rights to make a profit" and "the next version of Windows will be really good, honest", I've worked daily in Linux for the last two years, and I'm never going back.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
I can't even convince seventeen members of my not-so-immediate family to quit sending me seventeen copies of the latest chain mail or dancing baby. What makes him think I'm going to be able to convince them to quit sending me these things in Microsoft proprietary formats?!
First, I realize that this article is probably fictional as I doubt RMS actually receives email with Word attachments.
But I don't think he understands his audience. For when RMS tells someone, "You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so it is hard for me to read."
That person is going to say "Well then buy a real computer, you bone head."
(Assuming I have Word of course.)
-jfedor
Sombody with:
.doc files into RTF - by using an actuall copy of Word. Word is scriptable using VB, and there is a whole group of people who are experts at Word VB...Windows-virus writers. Just my USD .02 .
A copy of Word 2000
A decent net connection
A brain
could set up a web site that converted word
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it.
Isn't PDF a proprietary format of Adobe? True, you can download the reader for free, but is there a means of creating PDF's without paying for the upgrade?
When I got my answer from Sharp to the application
for the developer version of their Linux PDA, they
send me a Word document to fill out and mail in.
I replied that it seems a bit strange to send a Word
document to a Linux developer and a week or so later
they sent a new email with a PDF attachment.
So I think RMS has a point here. Although PDF may
not be the best format, it sure beats Word if you
don't use Windows and you can even use xpdf if
you don't have a Linux platform that is supported
by adobe.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I have this problem as well. I explain to the person that they can use Word's File->Open Web Page menu option, enter the URL for my resume, and it will be opened as a Word document. (I have my resume formatted completely into a table, which makes it look right on Word as well as the web.)
If they are not willing to go that small distance for me, there is generally not going to be a good working relationship anyway.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
HTML mail sucks.
It bloats messages up by a factor of ten or more and adds no content in most cases. As an example, an actual HTML mail message I received follows. A few points of interest:
The text/plain version of the message is a perfectly readable seven line message. Even the HTML mailers include this as part of a multipart/alternative message (the other alternative being text/html).
After 24 lines of HTML/XML preamble, we finally get to a 40-line style sheet.
The style sheet uses a number of non-standard attributes that are unique to Microsoft Office, and thus completely worthless on other platforms.
Do the world a favor and turn off HTML or Rich-Text in your mailer. The only people getting rich off it are Microsoft and whoever sells you bandwidth
Now that was something ! .doc format is a "proprietary secret format" There is absolutely no way he will understand what the f*ck I am talking about. And in fact nobody sending me .docs attachments is going to. .doc attchments are a pain in the ass and it would be nice to do something about it, RMS is not giving us any help to achieve it.
you know what ? I don't even know where to start..
So, let's see.. My Boss, as many others *knows* Microsoft invented the Internet, computers etc.. If I start telling him ms word's
And if I even care to tell him I am *puzzled* because he sent me a 237,545 bytes text in 867,345 bytes he will realize I'm just some kind of morron from another planet and fire me before I cause any harm to his business.
While I do agree
In fact, it's probably a way to get things even worse, not by having people send even more MS docs attachments, but by having them looking at any open source advocate as a fucking morron. And that woul be more harmful to the movement than just keeping quiet about this annoying fact.
RMS is trying to convince (for some reason) a primitive canibal tribe that they should not sacrifice any more people to their God, the sun, because it's just a big ball of gaxs etc.. etc.. with an extended astrophysics course to support his claims. Cool, he's right, but they'll have him for dinner.
Oh give me a break!
How hard can it be to find a computer with Word installed? Is buying the de facto standard word processor that much to be asked?
Most computers come with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. Getting the MS Office suite isn't that difficult (either legally or illegally).
The only reason you would NOT use MS Office is ideology.
If you want to suffer for free software, that's your prerogative but don't whine about it then!
I used to be a die-hard free software fanatic who wouldn't reply to html e-mails or e-mails that contained MS Office attachments.
Then I got a job and learnt that tolerance instead of shitty elitism is the way to go. Too bad RMS never learnt that.
Richard's wrath is misdirected: if the MS Email clients emitted proper RFC compliant MIME email---where each message had a plain text part and a rich text (i.e., MS Word) part---then there wouldn't be the same issue. MS's very poor record complying to RFCs and other industry standards is the real problem, not the use of MS Word.
None of MS's email clients emit RFC compliant email. MS Outlook combined with an MS Exchange server running in Enterprise Mode can be coerced into sending almost compliant email messages, but it is tough to do and the messages are still problematic enough that some email systems cannot deal with the resultant messages (e.g., Exchange to Notes email is very troublesome).
Ended the practice of handing out paper paycheck stubs a couple years ago and instead started sending them through email. What format? Why, MS Word of course!
I pitched a fit and a scant 10 months later they changed them to HTML files.
Of course, it's still stupid. It's a freaking pay stub! A couple k of TEXT - send the damn things as text files.
Sadly I cannot find a reference, but I remember reading that Steve Balmer in the context of some stockholders meeting said that even though they were moving to an XML format, they would use proprietary binary "blobs" to maintain an advantage.
Even if what I read is not quite correct, you can easily imagine large chuncks of your document in a binary PCDATA section of the document. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they might put all of the text and some formatting in plain tags and leave more complex things in a binary format - but even that could still render everyone in pretty much the same boat as we are in now in terms of inabilty to write documents or view a document correctly 100% of the time.
However, if a document was broken into smaller binary chunks people could reverse-engineer the format more easily leading to more programs that generate correct Word documents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why do you listen to this Communist?
Some people use word because it supports documents
that are not typed in US-ASCII. Chinese, Japanese
you get the point? 300 million Americans do not
represent the whole of humanity.
At least Microsoft has made their latest OS's
totally UNICODE. I would like you to show me
a UNIX derivative OS that can say the same.
Yeah, keep looking for things to complain about.
- Penguin Kicka
In the commentary RMS says:
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it.
Most users of Microsoft Word don't actually care about having the freedom to study or change it. Most don't even care about the right to copy or redistribute it except in making some limited copies for friends or to install on other computers. For most people Word works well and the issue of it being proprietary never effects them in any way they are likely to be aware of.
Until free software advocates can make it clear to the average use what the benefits of that freedom are, it will be very difficult to wipe out things like Word attachments. We have lots of people preaching to the geek choir and people convincing businesses of the value of open source (not free software, and it's an important distinction). But nobody is really convincing the average computer user of the value of free software (aside from possibly the "free as in beer" sense).
Simply responding to Word attachments with a political tirade isn't going to do anything except make the people who sent them to you think you're some commie wacko. The people who are likely to be receptive to such communiques are those who probably wouldn't send you the word attachment in the first place.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I must point out that I didn't come up with the above on my own. In fact, I think (though not positive) that it came from RMS.
I am puzzled. Why did you choose to send me 876,377 bytes in your recent message when the content is only 27,133 bytes?
My response to that would be:
Fuck you, you arrogant prick.
Thats a 29 byte message for you. Nice and concise.
Thanks, RMS. I think that sending a message with data to seven significant digits to convince people to change formats will really help the perception of the open source movement.
Renaming a plain text file resume.txt to resume.doc results in a file which can be opened by Word.
Not sure how long this will work, though.
-tom
If you aren't trolling, then why are you posting anonymously?
Clever signature text goes here.
My mail server bounces mail containing MS Office documents as well as sundry other attachment types. This stops stupid M$ viruses from filling up my mail spool.
I've never yet had trouble asking people to switch away from MS Office formats. When I explain why I don't like them, most people are quite willing to accomodate.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
At my old job, our engineering department successfully lobbied for people to stop sending documents as Word attachments.
Their explanation was a little simpler, which was basically, "Hi. Those of us with Unix machines don't have Word installed, so it's a major pain in the ass for us to read that document you just attached. Can you send it in a different format?" Personally, I wouldn't recommend using any of the examples in the article, as they all sound pretty self-righteous and would probably make an average recipient more likely to walk over and give the writer a massive wedgie than to change their email attachment behavior.
The drawback, of course, is that the people who were sending Word attachments in the first place were still composing them in MS Word. And so you've either got to deal with the huge mess that is Word's "Save as HTML" or you lose all the pretty formatting (which does sometimes include important diagrams or tables) when it's saved as text. But I suppose it's a moral victory, if nothing else...
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
When my boss sends documents to my group, he sends it in M$ format. We bitch, whine, complain, give long essays about Open Standards, M$ monopoly on Office, and how basically we never read what he sends us.
Yes, Star Office and Open Office sucks. Trust me. We had a Sales guy who tried the linux route, he couldn't cut it. He could barely read what clients sent him, and they could not read what he sent them. End of discussion.
More support for Open Standards, a real judgement (one that is also upheld) against M$ monopoly, and more time for Open Source to become even more of a force in the enterprise, will lead to real openess that RMS and millions promote and fight for on a daily basis.
In the end, my company has put more effort in PDF, HTML, and we've got a winbloze box in the office I share.
I apologize for replying to that message. It was unnecessary and uncalled for. Again, I apologize.
Clever signature text goes here.
What angers me the most is that some guy thinks going against a format is better than forcing people to use a particular one. It's the same thing. Also, no one argued when text lost its carriage return and line return in most documents. Why? Because there was a widespread and suitable alternative that was already in place.
Sometimes I think that Microsoft was meant to come up with "monopolistic" procedures in the same way other standards were set, like the 8-valve engine and VHS. It just happened. It became widespread, people learned to use it, most learned to like it (besides the descenting few on Slashdot) and now it's being used. Those who argue against it, as far as I'm concerned, are saying the same thing as "I won't accept VHS tapes. Please send BetaMax, a better, high-quality format".
Sorry, but I run a shop with a large number of offices and a large number of computers. We do business with many companies. Its worth the expense to purchase Office to assure that we will be able to communicate with our customers in the dominant way that is out there.
While i'm all for anything that saves me expenses, the author forgets that WORKAROUNDS cost TIME and TIME costs MONEY.
I'm not much for Microsoft's way of doing business, but I will NOT deny the fact that their Word format has pervaded and dominated nearly every market possible. Stallman is making a desperate attempt to reverse this, and all i can ask is - what makes him think that his word (no pun intended) will really change the world?
.DOCs that we have sitting around. When you can do that, you can get back on your soapbox and rant away, because then you might have a few more people listening.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but it needs to be said. Stallman is a very prominent figure in the Open Source community. However, Stallman is NOT GOD. He's not even a demigod. This editorial gives me the impression that the man has finally convinced himself that he is some sort of Open Source deity, and that all of his "minions" will be the ones that will finally topple the Microsoft Beast(TM). I know he's never been a particularly effective speaker or writer, but it seems to me that the man needs to get off his soapbox for a while. He's starting to remind me of Katz, for christ's sake...
But I digress.
Back on the topic of Microsoft Word...there's a very good reason that Word dominates the market the way it does. I'll spell it out for those who can't see it: Word has no competition. Simple as that. And it's not because Bill Gates personally hired hitmen to wipe out all the competition. And it's not because nobody wants an alternative. It's because the Open Source community hasn't been able to wean itself off of the old Vi/Emacs crap that it's been stuck with for years. Every new word processor that comes out for Linux/Unix looks, feels, and operates a lot like Emacs. Every Open Source attempt at cloning Word has failed miserably because it's not as good as Word...there IS NO OTHER EXCUSE.
I'll elaborate a bit on this point...RMS, like so many other Open Source developers and advocates, is convinced that EVERYONE operates a computer on the same level that he does. He seems to think that EVERYONE using Windows should have at least three years of programming experience in C or something similar. He's convinced that EVERYONE should know how to compile a kernel and maintain his own source code. He's perplexed by the fact that so few people write device drivers for themselves.
The sad, sad truth is that VERY FEW PEOPLE share Mr. Stallman's expertise. In fact, I would be VERY comfortable saying that at least 95% of computer users do not have even close to the same level of expertise. Moreover, it's safe to say that at least 80% of computer users have NEVER EVEN HEARD of Open Source. That's why Word isn't going to disappear. That's why HR execs are going to continually ask you for a Word-formatted resume. That's why Word documents aren't going to magically go away.
My editorial advice to Stallman: if you don't want to get any more Word documents in your e-mail, design something better. When your superior alternative to MS Word is available, make sure it's free, and that the world knows it. And make sure it's FULLY compatible, so that we can convert all of those pesky
What if you want to read email on a PDA or web appliance? Also, I've often received word attachments that don't display correctly and have parts missing because I don't have the same set of fonts as the sender.
.doc files by using little white lies and telling them either (a) your antivirus software raised flags on the attachment (b) oops, the server seems to be stripping attachments (c) the document was illegible because of a font or version problem
You can always get people to reexamine the issue of sending
Suggestions to use PDF are retarded. Acrobat costs WAY more than word, and you want to talk about secret proprietary format... jees.
.wpd format, but there's this nifty converter feature in MS Word, so I live with it. I don't reply saying "What are you doing, don't you know not everyone uses Wordperfect... what a dumbass user you are."
Replying to users telling them to put it in RTF or another format is perfectly acceptable. Replying to users ranting about free software is not.
I hate it when people send me attachments in
Get off your high opensource horse, there's bigger things in this world to complain about.
Set a default file format for saving new documents
On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab.
In the Save Word files as box, click the file format you want.
When you send them polite reply that they should send normal email in text format, attach only pre-written documents if there's no way to convert into another format that engineers can read. The next thing you know, you get a review of having a bad attitude and you don't want to cooperate. And you know where that comments come from, right?
It's a royal pain in the butt when you have one Windows machine shared between 20 engineers all working on Unix.
Why aren't more people suggesting this (RTF format)? RTF is the best of all worlds.
The truth is that HTML was never meant to be a document formatting language. There is no mechanism for margins or other such "printed page" stuff. It's just too difficult for normal users to transport documents around (multiple files)
I don't understand how people can actually compare plain text to a word document. Plain text is just like HTML with all the tags removed. It just doesn't cut the mustard.
PDF is okay, but doesn't have the ability to for straightforward editing. Yes, I know you can edit it, but it wasn't really meant for that.
RTF is pure text, no crazy binary files, so you can edit it in emacs if you want and it is viewable by almost everyone. You could even put it into CVS! WordPad, which has been included with Windows for a while now will read it (and save to it) without even the download of the Word Viewer (which is free from MS).
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I just tried it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
While that would be trivial to write, the usefulness of that is almost nill. Even most of the users that I am responisble for now understand that a .VBS file or a "macro" in their word files is something bad. They don't really know _why_ but in any case they've figured out the connection by now.
If I've trained them properly, they would delete your email promptly! (Hopefully)
Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking!
501 Not Implemented
I agree that it would be nice if everyone didn't use Word, and did use an open standard that we could take apart, etc. etc.
.doc or who asks you to submit them in the manner that Stallman suggests is not going to make that happen. It is going to further marginalize the open source community as a bunch of people who say things like 'could you please not use this bloated, secret format and instead use the internationally accepted one of plain text.'
But sending a message to everyone who sends you a Word
Plain text? Plain text doesn't cut it. People want fonts. People want alignment. The solution to defeating a bloated, proprietary word processor is not to abandon word processors. Suggesting to any technophobe that they should use plain text instead of Word is going to cause a very hostile reaction; not only have these people shelled out money for MS Office that you are now telling them not to use, but take a look at their face when they open up Notepad (or Notepad+, or get them to use Vi. Ha.) "Where are all the buttons?"
People need to be shown the advantages of the end-result RMS is suggesting. His sample emails have the tone of 'You are insulting me by sending me this arcane, bloated technology. How dare you. Do it my way.' That is not going to win anybody any converts.
A couple months ago someone gave a presentation at the local LUG (www.aclug.org) on staroffice.. The guy who gave the presentation claimed that He has been using Staroffice for many months in a large M$ Office oriented employer.. After months of composing and sharing documents made in staroffice with microsoft office and vice versa he never encountered a compability problem. In fact, no one has noticed that he has NOT been using Microsoft Office. After the meeting I installed staroffice on my teen sisters debian box I made for her.. She has been tickled pink over the fact that she can now work on power-point presentations and word documents at both home and school.. As for my self I do have staroffice 6 installed but I rarely use it for my line of work, but it seems to have way better compability (did i mention Office XP compatible?) than any other office software I have used for linux..
I Know that there is one XML standard for drawing programs (or at least a draft proposal..) but I can't . It seems like they need to simplify where to find these thing to get usage up.
Auto numbered lists always got munged in Word every time I've tried to make any substantial use of them, so it hardly comes as a surprise that they'd be odd when exported...
I mean, I'm with you if you mean "reasonable for RMS," but did you read the "polite" responses he had?
Can you imagine how anyone in the mainstream corporate world would react to any of them?
At best, they'd think you're a paranoid loon. At worst, they'd get furious at you and spread their opinions to others.
Tons of people following this advice would be the single biggest setback that free software would have in the corporate world.
That said, an actual polite response would probably get some effect. Something explaining that you do not use Word, what formats you'd accept, and how to do so in Word.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
* 2002-01-11 13:25:32 Stallman says 'Just Say No' to Word Documents (articles,internet) (rejected)
- fader
I don't have any experience in word filters,
.'
so how easy would it be to write a word decoder
that would output only output the tracking info
written (i believe) in every word document ?
That would let people w/o word reply to the sender
with sthg like 'Sorry, I couldn't open your doc,
my WP only outputs , ,
That might give them a perception of what's wrong
with proprietary closed formats.
Goretex mot regnet
fleece mot kall snö
i paniken & trängseln
blir du kall & blöt
så tar jag min chans
Du vet hur det är
Jag släpper din hand
och lämnar dig där...
I think he also forgets that the world isn't completely populated by doped-up, conspiracy theorizing, Unsatiable fanatics who haven't quite made it out of the 1980's university computer philosophy mindset.
Stallman:Computers::Phelps:Religion
Of course, some would say, using the messianic POV:
Stallman:Computers::Christ:Judaism,
and i'd say most of these people are here.
but i'd counter with
Stallman:Computers::Christ:Gnostic Christianity
I do agree. Computers are a tool. I use that analogy quite often. When i want to use a drill, i don't want to build it myself. I'd rather get it from Black and Decker. Now black and decker tools arent ment to explode at random intervals.. but the last crash of windows i've ever had that was windows' fault was in 98.
My usual way for reading a Word attachment is "|strings" in XEmacs VM. It isn't half bad for getting the *content* of the message. All formatting and font crap are thrown out the door of course. But if the author is relying on formatting and font crap to get their point across, perhaps he/she needs to rethink what it is they're trying to say.
So RMS is saying that we ought to be bullying Gandma (or whoever) into sending mail in the 'correct' format, just because we happen to disapprove of MS Word. Hey - I have another idea - maybe we should filter mail based on the X-Mailer header: "sorry Dad - I didn't hear about the funeral. Now maybe if you used a mail client that I approved of..."
.doc support for Linux.
In all seriousness, this seems to be a theme with RMS - he can't stand to see people making their own choices. His GPL license is all about forcing people into his kind of happy-clappy hippy co-operation. He doesn't seem to realise that you can't tell people how to live.
One final thought - maybe if certain open source advocates spent half the time they spend complaining actually coding, we'd already have proper
thanks,
dave jatt.
Before you flame me for that subject line let me explain.
.DOCs not as just a unreasoned preference but as an intelligent decision.
Browse Slashdot at -1. How many of those trolls would you not need to beat with a clue-by-four within an inch of their lives to get them to post on-topic? (I don't mean just once or sometimes, I mean forever and always.)
My sister is like this. Every six months I get another chain letter from her ("Re: New Virus Warning" or maybe "Re:Great Internet Snowball Fight 2005"). I do not like chain letters. They are spam; I filter them as such. Each time she sends me a chain letter, I send a very polite "don't do this again; chain letters go to my trashcan"-style response.
Maybe I ought to take a clue from RMS; tell her that I believe chain letters consumes network resources, that massive numbers can become counter productive-- in short all the standard anti-spam arguments. If I present myself calmly and rationally I expect (from experience) that she will stop. If I do a really good job, maybe she'll change her opinion. Take this example from letter 2: "Receiving Word attachments is bad for you because they can carry viruses" is calm, well spoken, and provides a reason that the sender may never want to see another Word file themselves. Spoken in this manner they might see your "opinion" against Word
Something tells me that's the reason my sister keeps sending me spam: I've never really told her why I want her to stop (just been a prick and threatened to trash her emails to me, if in a polite manner).
Do you like Japanese imports?
Heheh, Mr. Troll, for someone who doesn't like Word you sure got your value-for-money out of its thesaurus features...
graspee
RMS sometimes lives in a fantasy world, as evidenced by this quote from the article:
I hate to break it to you, Robert, but the vast majority of computer users couldn't program their way out of an "if" statement. And they don't want to program. You and I may have a grand time exploring code and writing software; most people just want to sit down, write a note to Aunt Emma, read the joke their kid sent them from college, or check the latest football score. They want to play Quake, not write it.
The freedom to examine a program's source code is meaningless to 99% of computer users. They'd rather spend a hundred (or two) bucks on an upgrade than learn C...
Now, as for getting rid of Word attachments, I totally agree. I also despise HTML e-mail. I'd love for them to go away -- but even some programmers I know can't send an e-mail unless it contains a dozen fonts and background images. And don't forget its easy to be on a religious crusade when you don't live in the real world. You may be able to tell people to stop sending Word attachments; I say such a thing to a potential client, and I guarantee they'll hire someone else.
I note that O'Reilly, supposed scion of Open Source, uses Word for all of its book publishing. I spent more time fiddling with their damned Word templates than I did writing a book (not yet printed)... but was I going to refuse a book contract because they kept mailing Word docs around? I think not...
All about me
Your best bet is to support the alternative wordprocessor in whatever way you can.
So why not solve the problem by just telling the people not to send them? Since most email (minus SPAM) comes from relatives or business associates, why not tell Mom and Pop to stop and have the clients/partners respectfully use plain text messages? I have done this and it works quite well.
RMS is a Free Software advocate. Free Software is political because it's about rights and freedom.
And the whole thrust of this article was not "Let's convince people to send us documents we can read" it was "Let's use the issue of not being able to read these documents to promote the wider issue of Free Software".
I happen to disagree with RMS but what he's saying is totally consistent with his beliefs. I would no more expect him to use 'non-political' examples than I would for him to call GNU software Open Source.
How are these documents ending up attached to emails? Are people writing their email in Word, then saving, then switching to Outlook [Express] and then attaching them? Or, is Outlook doing this for them behind the scenes? If it's the former case, why are people using that process? If it's the latter case, it's going to take more than a polite email asking people not to send Word attachments... it will need instructions about how they should change their programme settings, which might not be an option to them anyway.
Once again, RMS has turned something mundaine, such as reading your email, into a political statement. For 99.9999% of all people who use the computer the whole point of using the computer is so that they can do their job better. They don't make the decision about which software packages to buy. They don't make the decision about what format to use to save file. They don't know the difference between RTF and DOC formats. They couldn't read HTML if it reached out and bit them in the butt.
.DOC documents and, believe it or not, I'm not concerned about my older documents becoming unreadable. What Stallman forgets is that the format is as much a straight jacket for Microsoft as for anybody else. Sure you may or may not be able to read a ten year old document but I would bet that twenty years from now I will still be able to read documents I write this year. It's entirely possible that this will be true a hundred or even a thousand years from now.
.NET adds a whole bunch of new key words to C++. You could also refuse to use a compiler built and sold by Microsoft. Write code that only works on Linux. Work on things that make computing better, not just more difficult.
All they want to do is read their email and use their documents. If they have to forward it on to someone else then they just want to take the document and drop it in a letter and send it on. They don't want to have to deal with the complete and total hassle of opening the document and saving it off as some sort of Stallman approved attachment and then dropping that into an email attachment.
The whole point behind the computer age is that these machines are supposed to make our lives easier. I for one could care less who owns the format for Microsoft
The other possibility is that Microsoft obsoletes documents written more than seven or some years ago. This is, of course, nutty because Microsoft's customers would sue them into the poor house, or worse, just stop buying upgrades.
Think I'm wrong, take a look at how long it took for them to get ride of the 8086 stuff, and that was an idea everybody agreed on.
I understand Stallman's political point but what he is doing is guaranteeing that he never sees another email from someone who uses Word. His proposed solution is little more than taking a tiny sharp stick and digging it around in an open wound. Or worse, its just another rock in the shoe of life.
Want to make a political statement? Then ask why
Beware the wood elf!!!
komi
P.S. Note- you need MS Word to read the attachment.
P.P.S. Next I'll have to email everyone on how to fight the spam problem.
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
Get real.
If you email someone saying not to send Word documents (and I know this from experience), they are baffled. They don't know what file formats are. They don't know what ascii text is. They don't even know how to copy-n-paste for Pete's sake!!!
Asking actual end-users to use a different format, or copy-n-paste text, is like asking a monkey to set the table.
Plus, you come across as an elitist geek snob. Joe Jackass end-user couldn't care less about proprietary formats, open source, operating systems, etc. Until this elementary fact is well understood, open-source will continue to get the cold shoulder from the 90% of people out there who qualify as "end-users".
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
OK Here goes my Karma....
Due to snoops and other l337 h@x0rs I am asking you to send your e-mail encrypted and do not give me information on the Key. This stops evil people from having the ability to function easily.
Thats about the same concept...however his quote was BEST!
"You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so it is hard for me to read. If you send me plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I will read it."
So now I have to buy Adobe to create a PDF for him to be able to read my e-mails...
Also I have used a copy of Word 97 at work for years. I have NO TROUBLE with Office 2K or XP and reading docs. Maybe for the type of work he does txt is acceptable for looks. In my line I need the power of a more robust system. We use Corel for years, however Office IS the Standard regardless of if you like it or not. YOU ARE A MINORITY IF YOU DON'T USE IT!
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
Consider this:
A national company has satellite locations compile a weekly report in MS word. These reports are then sent to a central office to be combined into a single report for Sr. Management.
Challenge: Satellites have different versions of word. Formatting conflicts arise, and the tail chase starts. No one wants to spend the money to standardize. Thus, 1 hour report turns into 8 hour headache, (converting all graphs and tables into pictures) with internal revisions (spin) at the local level.
Free options (StarOffice) promoted and pitched, but CTO Big MS proponent, thus no consolidation.
*** Moral of the story: Changes need to be made at a strategic level, and not just tactically. Sure, asking someone to refrain from sending a certain file type is fine, but in the commercial environment change is slow.
*** As stated earlier, standards come and go, and eventually the folks that campaign for a free and open environment will be in positions to influence the commercial world. Pick your battles and bide your time.
--- Best to all
I am me...I think
...except when it comes to using Word?
Most .doc files i get arent from coworkers. They are usually from non-geeks, or its in a work environment where we just *are* using MS stuff, so theres no point in me complaining.
.doc readers for other OS`s. It would seem to be the obvious way to deal with this `problem`, although i guess it does make it easier for hackers to reverse engineer formats for adding to genuinely free software. (then again, how hard is that?)
Non-geeks generally hate MS as much as geeks, just because of the speed and stability (or lack thereof) rather than political reasons about Freedom, or technical reasons (like file formats).
Also, Linux doesnt enter into it - the OS someone produced a document with is (or at least should) be none of my concern.
Have Microsoft produced
I'd venture that plain ASCII email is better than one with a Word, or any word-processor, attachment. It uses >far less bandwidth, can be read immediately, and can be viewed on any platform, even a cellphone.
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Look, I'm a consultant. Staying employed requires that I make my clients happy, and part of doing that is making them feel that doing business with me is an effortless task.
Clients, unconsciously, have a scale in their head that weighs how much they've put into me versus how much they've received back from me. Every little thing I ask them to give me or do for me reduces their perception of the benefit/cost ratio, and reduces the likelyhood they'll use my services again. Really, clients generally want me to come in and pull a completed job out of thin air with no assets from them, and much as they technically understand that they have to give me stuff to work with they don't actually like it.
So, I make a point to bend over backward for the client on the little stuff so that when I do have to ask the client for something, it's always something that's really important to the project. Convincing them to support free software does not constitute "important to the project".
I can just imagine telling a client I can't read their Word file. They'll think I'm incompetent for being improperly equipped and replace me.
Like it or not I'm stuck with Word unless a court breaks up the Microsoft monopolies and businesses start using more of a variety of software. I can give my clients PDFs, but that isn't going to change their file habits anytime soon.
How hard would it be to write an MS Word virus that would change this preference when a document was opened?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The reason recruiters (headhunters) always ask for resumés as word documents is because they plan to (a) delete your contact information so that the employer can't cut them out of the loop by contacting you directly; and (b) slap their own logo or letterhead at the top, and in the process destroy all your precious table column/layout formatting AND THUS ensuring that the extra last page will be only 6 lines of text.
In my experience, 99% of agency headhunters will look at the PDF of your resumé and send you an RMS-like rejection e-mail requesting a Word doc. For their benefit this is why I keep an HTML version posted on the web: let them copy/paste from IE into Word and format it themselves, har har har!
Get lose, you can't compare with my powers.
They either think:
(1) You're a bloody idiot who can't figure it out, and the rhetoric is just a cover.
(2) You're playing games with them.
Nice suggestion, Mr. Stallman!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't have any experience in word filters,
.doc"'.
so how easy would it be to write a word decoder
that would output only output the tracking info
written (i believe) in every word document ?
That would let people w/o word reply to the sender
with sthg like 'Sorry, I couldn't open your doc,
my WP only outputs "name of writer", "computer he used", "other tracking info and private data we can find in a
That might give them a perception of what's wrong
with proprietary closed formats.
Here's a perl kludge I use to convert doc on the fly into PDF and open in acrobat from kmail:
/_/g;
/\\ /g;
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $fn=shift;
my $or=$fn;
$fn=~s/.*\/(.*)\.doc$/$1/o;
$fn=~s/
$or =~ s/
`antiword -p letter $or | ps2pdf - > $HOME/tmp/$fn.pdf `;
exec("/usr/bin/acroread $HOME/tmp/$fn.pdf");
It does require antiword which you can obtain from freshmeat.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
Next time anyone asks you for "Word document" or "DOC file", just write an Ascii text document, change its extension to ".DOC" and send it to him. When Windows user opens it, it will be automatically opened in Word without any problems and vast majority of Windows users will be perfectly happy, not even noticing that the font is somehow different from what they are used to... And you are doing exactly what they wanted. It's definitely "DOC file" and because the Word can handle it, it's also a "Word file".
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
But that doesn't mean I can't agree with him on this. Actually, I agree with him on a lot of levels. I just hate that he takes it all so personally and religiously.
Actually, I have had word documents emailed to me in the past and on systems where I run MS Word, I have macros and VBA disabled and all that. I have on many occasions received messages stating "this file contains [executable code] would you like to turn this feature on?"
1. Most authors do not ever need to run code in a DOCUMENT. Why is such "power and flexibility" there in the first place? Barely anyone except virus writers will ever use it. Therefore, it represents nothing more than a security risk to its users.
2. There is so much "bloat" in the resulting document files that very small content gets ballooned into documents often up to ten times the size! (That's just a rough guess... quote me on it, but don't expect it to be 100% accurate...hehe) Therefore it's mostly a big waster of space all around.
3. Often too much personal information about the author or the computer it was written from is included in the document exposing the legitimate user [licensee, not owner] to privacy risks.
I include all three of these reasons to people who send me Word documents and most people THANK me for enlightening them. Often times, I offer suggestions for how to change the default save format to "RTF" format. I don't know how "safe" that format is, but it has got to be better than DOC format(s). I mention RTF as opposed to HTML because it translates from word a bit better than HTML does -- looks more like the original document in most cases. People ARE concerned about the appearance of their documents and if they change radically because of conversion to more elementary formats, they CRINGE at the idea of converting.
So remember to be sensitive to the fears of converting or even doing a simple "save as..."
Yeah too bad there aren't any alternatives to Word. No one has been able to make a free Word editor. Great article. What cave is this guy living in?
I think the only way the .doc, .xls, .ppt lock will be broken is if a big supplier of software, such as AOL, distributes AOL 9.0 with StarOffice for free on CDs distributed as bulk mail.
Currently, users of MS operating systems can read word documents in the free beer sense, but are obliged to pay $$$ to be able to write them (wouldn't you love to own that toll both, considering how much business documentation is tied up in .doc files!).
A version of StarOffice that:
- is free as in beer
- is free as in GPL'd source
- strongly supports import of old versions of Word, Wordperfect, etc.
- outputs an open standard XML
- is featureful (eg, graphics, math)
- is easy to learn
- has internationalization support
would do wonders for killing off the actual handcuffs that MS uses as a cash cow.What would really be nice if the mimetypes for StarOffice new format would provoke web browsers into a simple choice of either downloading and installing the free StarOffice binary for their platform (including Win9x) or, if they haven't the oomph with their existing modem for a multi MB download, to offer to crunch the XML through a conversion website to display it for them (I think Sun already has something like this in mind).
My thanks to Richard Stallman, though, for answering a question I had posted earlier to Slashdot:
Is there a gentle, kind, informative explanation that someone has already prepared that I can use to auto reply to misguided souls in my organization who think that .doc files are as standard as text or HTML?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
let's straighten some things out right now, before it gets too confusing. there are three possible desired features for basic documents:
all documents should have information, but not all need prettiness or printability. if the goal is to take information and present it in an easier-to-read format, with easily-identifiable headings and subheadings, then prettiness becomes important. if, in addition, printouts of the document will be used as something other than rough drafts, printability becomes an issue.
the point I'm trying to make, of course, is that not every document needs the same amount of formatting details. margin information is only necessary for a document that's intended as a final printed product. stuff that's used in a company as an internal reference only doesn't need margin information, just info like bold and italics, and maybe some diagrams. HTML is great for that. if someone wants to print out an HTML doc, they can set their own margins.
but a lot of documents -- email, memos -- do not even need prettiness. they should be done in plain text.
RMS may have influence over the computer science and computer engineering communities, but he will need to work a lot harder at influencing IT managers and the rest of society to win them over to Open Source.
After reading this piece, I would not be convinced to do all of my word processing in RTF, plain text, or convert everything to postscript or PDF for public use and dissemination. I spend a lot of time working with individuals and consultants who use M$ Word that it would be costly for me business-wise to convert everything over to formats that my associates and customers would not be able to understand.
RMS needs to realize that for businesses, communication with the greatest number of people, not just a few who believe in his objective of believing that all software must be free and open.
With various document-sharing systems commercially/freely available (WebDAV making them local-drive easy to use) why would you even want to send an attachment at all? Why not just store it in some arbitrary location on a shared filesystem and e-mail the URL?
(As we do at where I work.)
'course, this assumes people can actually use and get to said distributed filesystem...HTTP-based systems are by far the easiest to share Internet-wide.
I agree with the annoyance of MS Word attachments, but the solution proposed in the RMS editorial is insufficient. If a person requiring MS Word format is a problem, to provide a solution, one must consider why the person is using the MS Word format. RMS suggests that the problem is user ignorance. His solution to user ignorance is user education by them by sending them an email. He does not consider there might be valid reasons why the person requires MS Word.
.'. After reading Slashdot comments, you get a picture of the reasons people use MS Word. Solve these needs and then people will stop asking for MS Word attachments.
There are genuine needs that MS Word solves. For example, having a single file for a document with figures cannot be done with HTML. PDF is mostly read-only, but MS Word can be edited. Solve problems like this and many of us can finally abandon Word. If fact, the community could stop trying to emulate MS Word and start creating solutions that are better than it.
The reasons why people use MS Word will be added to this Slashdot as we comment on 'use X instead' and 'I use MS Word instead of X because . .
Stallman: Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous.
It's a stupid requirement, sure, but would you hire someone who can't (or won't) problem-solve? Apart from the obvious technical solutions, you could go to Kinko's, or ask a friend, or whatever. If this is a showstopper for a job applicant, they're either an idiot or a prima donna.Neither one makes a very good employee.
I thought PDF was a format of Adobe's, which open software had only been able to decode through reverse engineering (xpdf comes to mind, plus FOP from apache/xml, or the very basic plaintext-to-pdf format in gedit). Yes, acroread is freely downloadable, but generating PDF is not free officially, and acroread is still limited on the platforms it supports, being both closed source and Motif based (last I saw, Motif was still officially closed source on non-free platforms).
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I'm probably as sick of Unix world domination plans as you are- but don't go encouraging Unix developers to write something other than what's simpler for them. The stuff IS free in both ways, after all- the most we can expect is that people solve their own problems first! Everything after that is gravy.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
A while back, I participated in a beta test for Sybase. It was specifically for the Linux release. Ironically, they messed up and emailed the license agreement in Word format. Naturally, many of us complained, and they quickly responded with a PDF fail and apologized for the "mistake."
IMO that's not his main point. He's a Free Software advocate and he wants you to be. He wants you to use the issue of not being able to open a file as an opportunity to spread the Good News about Free Software.
Forgive me for presuming but based on your reply, I would guess you have a more pragmatic goal - getting people to send you files you can read.
Stallman is proposing a particularly counterproductive way to go about it
Counterproductive to your goal not his. I'm sure RMS would prefer to be perceived as difficult whilst hopefully communicating something about Free Software, than to not appear difficult at all but to argue the case merely on pragmatism. See his writings on why he doesn't use the term Open Source for evidence of this.
I applied for a position as a Sendmail admin. I sent my resume in .txt. The recriter replied back with: "Please send me a copy in .doc format."
What bothers me even more than Word is getting Excel attachments.
It seems that a LOT of people get so enamoured of Excel that they think it's the appropriate tool for anything from columned lists to databases.
Columns of information can be represented easily in HTML, ascii, or even the evil Word, so why do these idiots keep sending me Excel spreadsheets?
If you really dont want to recieve or promulgate any word documents, set up your mailserver to filter out all .doc attachments and replace them with a small ascii note:
<<< Word.doc 900k -- file removed by VirusScanner 7.0 >>>
Then anyone who uses the server can honestly reply- "I want to get that document from you, but my virus scanner keeps deleting it, if you could send it as plain text or rtf... "
This directive will fit nicely next to the ones for *.exe, *.vbs, etc.
The first thing we technical writers learn in our profession is Consider Your Audience.
.RTF suffice, so I won't elaborate here.
.DOC files, thankyouverymuch. If your resume looks funny in Word format, most of the time it's because you tried to get a little too creative with the formatting.
Imagine the reaction of the admin assistant in HR who sees the boilerplate message RMS advocates. Your average office drone doesn't know or care about the file formats or the merits of open software; s/he wants to get work done, period. If I were a Windows-accustomed office user and I saw that kind of diatribe in an email, my eyes would cross as my finger caressed the Del key. Others' admonitions about writing a short-to-the-point message (with instructions) about
However, for creating and sending, I'd add: If the formatting is kept sufficiently simple, StarOffice works just fine for creating
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
The only people that send me Word attachments are co-workers. More specifically, supervisors. If I were to send them even a polite mail (as opposed to RMS' suggested "secret, proprietary format" diatribe) I would just a get reply saying, "You don't have Word? Call the Help Desk so your machine can be re-imaged," or "You can't read it because you're running Linux? Clyde will be right over to confiscate your computer."
.hqx attachment from a Mac user. Trying to explain the concept of file formats to this man was, as they say, like teaching a pig to sing.)
It's against college policy to possess a Linux computer (I'm not kidding), and to a lesser zeal of enforcement, against policy to have a computer with MS Office installed. I imagine there are hundreds of other large institutions out there with similar policies.
Unless I can convince the President of the college to talk to the VP of IT about appointing a committee to consider instituting a policy restricting the use of Word attachments, they're not going away, no matter how many nice e-mails I send out.
(It's also interesting that the worst case of cross-platform non-interoperability I've encountered is a Windows user who received an
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is why linux lusers are a PAIN IN THE ASS!
One thing this article did right was to choose Word to attack. It's a common file format, used by thousands of users and companies to do a lot of simple things that usually do not require the 'power' that Microsoft Word gives you.
Yes, Office's Word is the best text editor available (IMHO).
So, from an highly biased Open Source advocate perspective, stopping people from misusing Word has several effects:
1) Prevent them from starting to use OTHER Office applications. Sure, Excel and Access (whatever more) can do pretty nice stuff and there's a lot of people using it. But, pretty much like those badly done anti-drugs campaigns when they try to tell you that Marijuana is a door to hook you up with more potent drugs, so it is Word. People get into it to use as a text editor and suddenly are 'addicted' to other Microsoft apps. They become valuable work tools just for the fact that you started using them;
2) There are a LOT of classes about Word, and Office. A LOT of job offers that requires knowledge of the Office suit. And I am not talking about computer related stuff... To almost anything at other fields. Try to start as an intern (that naturally will have to perform 'lower' tasks, like type other people documents or specs, essays, etc...) or a secretary without knowledge of Word. It's very hard.
With so many companies asking for Word skills, it's natural that schools will teach them. So you are just beggining in the life of work.. You open the classified ads and they are require computer skills... them you look for courses/classes... All of them offer Word/Excel/Powerpoint classes at lower prices because there's simple so much competition among these schools to get students. It's a vicious circle, that makes people who are entering the game attached to a software/format.
3) It's plain simple and easy to use other text file format for almost 100% of your communications. You do not need Word on a daily basis, yet so people use it. Educating them that there are better options (or sometimes just saying "I won't open it, convert it") is effective.
I highly disagree with RMS method of saying "a secret proprietary format", Joe user line of thought goes something like:
"Secret? Everybody uses it!!!"
But, choosing to attack Word was one of the best options available to change something on the userland level.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Unfortunately, many of the clients I deal with simply don't know how to use anything other than Word. The vacuous open-mouth stare I get when I try to explain that they too can create PDF files, just goes to prove that I will always have a job. Sure, it gets in the way of my programming duties, but if they're willing to pay the $160/hour to have me do it then it suits me just fine. It may also explain why other companies are out of business and we are still doing quite well.
Word is simply the only program that most non-tech people know. Because it's there on the "desktop" it's all they will ever know. If you want to change the "standard" then you have to provide a choice other than Word. But the problem with that is most companies and people don't want to have to buy two programs that do the same job.
I'm sorry to say this, but there is no easy solution to this problem. My biggest complaint isn't about Word attachments but the people that send Powerpoint files as instructions instead of a simple email. And yes. I got a two slide PPT to explain to me that a word was misspelled. One to show how it was wrong, and the other to show how it should be spelled.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
What is even worse are winmail.dat files leaking out of sundry and various Exchange servers!
I just opened up Word '97 and typed two letters ("Hi") into a new document and saved the file. This file is 19,456 bytes. What was a simple email has now become large and complex. Not good.
This way they can weed out the wierdoes like the RMS disciples.
The "educational" messages RMS suggests are derisive and condescending. I guess I should have expected nothing less.
.DOC files. I don't know why this option wouldn't be available to those who wish to create file converters - that was one of the primary reasons it was made available. They might balk at giving it to competitors, but for those developing utility programs, not office suites, it may be an option.
Not that it's not unreasonable to discuss the format in which you and another person wish to exchange files, though. You should.
It used to be that you could sign an NDA with Microsoft and get a complete copy of the Word file format specifications. This was to allow third-party software developers to write code that works with
The vast majority of Word users will never feel deprived because they cannot access or modify the source code for Word (or Windows). The vast majority of Word users are not programmers. Ignoring this turns a practical discussion into a theological discussion, which may please RMS, but does little to support a reasonable argument.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
I think we should all send Stallman an email with a "Hello World" word document attached.
rms@gnu.org
There are a lot of good reasons to not use Word files. Trouble is, you have to explain all that to every person you get attachments from, and you're probably the only person making such an argument.
I say hit MS where they're tender: Security. Word files are an easy conduit for viruses. Make that the point, and the only point: "I'm sorry, but due to the large number of Windows macro based viruses we discourage the use of '.doc' files. If at all possible, please use a different format when you save (Rich Text Format is an excellent choice) documents for emailing. If you just use the default Word format you risk sending viruses. Thank you!"
Posted as a reply on Newsforge:
Although I am in total agreement with Richard with the conundrum of Word attachments, I disagree with his examples:
"You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it."
Firstly, the grammar is misleading. The first sentence implies that the Word doc was sent with the intention of not allowing the recipient to read it. Secondly, how can he assume that the average Word-user will know the difference between plain text, HTML, and PDF? What program will they use to create PDF documents...Acrobat ($$)?
Unfortunately, the article has the effect of elitism whereas the intention was to inform.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
You really need to come up with something better to tell people. There are several good reasons to avoid sending Word attachments that even the non-techie types should understand, even if they are avid Microsoft supporters.
- Not everybody can read word attachments. This is probably the biggest reason. If you are a MAC user, you may not have Word installed. If you bought a computer with Microsoft Works or an older version of Word, you may not be able to read the Word file. And few people know enough to install the Microsoft Word filter that lets other programs read Word files. You are practically forcing the recipient to go out and buy Microsoft Word if they want to read your message.
- Word attachments take up more space and take longer to send. By needlessly sending something as a Word attachment, you rob all of the systems between you and the recipient of network and storage resources. You also may waste your recipient's time by forcing them to sit through a longer download of their e-mail -- especially if they use dialup.
- Word attachments may contain viruses. You can't expect everyone to feel comfortable about opening such attachments.
- It may actually take up more of YOUR time to compose a document in Word and then attach it to an e-mail message. Just typing the thing into e-mail in the first place is usually a quicker solution.
Based on any combination of these points, it should be fairly simple to come up with a standard reply that states a good argument against sending Word attachments without alienating any of the senders.You have sent an attachment in Microsoft Word format. Word attachments are saved in a proprietary format and may contain viruses, therefore requiring more care and effort on my part to read them. Because of this extra effort, I give messages with Word attachments lower priority when reading and responding to e-mail. Please consider re-sending your attachment in a non-proprietary format, such as Rich Text (.RTF), which handles most common formatting features and can be loaded and saved by most word processors, including Microsoft Word.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
We have ONE single Windows Box in our company whose goal is essentially to be able to read and write Word documents. So yes, if people could use PDF or ASCII as a standard, that would allow us to get rid of this computer ;)
On the other hand, Word is pretty good to select candidates. When someone is sending his resume in PS or PDF, it's clearly a better start than when it is sent in Word...
Call them GNU/Word attachments?
sulli
RTFJ.
Of course, this could be a limitation in StarOffice rather than the RTF file format, but either way, I can't use RTF for the one document that I need to send out the most.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Also, I think that you can publish to PDF from some versions of WordPerfect, which is not as expensive as Acrobat.
Okay, I don't necessarily agree with Stallman's point, and I definitely don't agree with his proposed responses to the problem.
But I did run into this ad while checking my hotmail account, and I thought it was pretty funny in light of the current discussion
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
The latest version of Acrobat Reader for OS/2 is 3.0, which is now two versions old. I can't read any PDFs created with Acrobat 4.0 or 5.0, and the number of such PDFs floating around increases daily. So I don't think PDF is such a great idea either.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
RMS toughts are good... his Agenda is self serving... IHO
.doc to PDF conversion...
>
Asking folks to send documents in PostScript, PDF, or HTML formats
is all that is needed...
Perhaps a service for a mail provider is to supply is
Kramer
The answer to this problem is simple just port MSoffice to linux or ask MS and maybe they will do it
Cux you know MS loves Linux!!
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
elsewhere, I wrote that documents have a three-tiered hierarchy of desirable features:
information is desirable in any document, prettiness is also desirable in some cases, and printability is necessary in a few.
many people here are pushing RTF, which is good as far as it goes. however, plain text is best for most purposes, like the often-mentioned "writing a letter to your mother" or interoffice memos. when pictures and bold text are necessary, HTML will fit the document's prettiness needs in most cases, although RTF might allow a few more options; the decision on whether to use HTML or RTF really hinges on whether you want hyperlinks.
people keep bringing up print format information, like margins. most of the time, print format information isn't necessary. no one seems to mention that, if someone wants to print a document that doesn't have margins set, it's possible to set the margins when printing.
if exact print formatting is needed, the best portable format is PDF. and there's a nifty GPL program called HTMLDoc that will work just fine for windows users who need stricter format information. I only wish it would read CSS and all kinds of table formats.
I think it's important to seperate the needs of a document into information, prettiness, and printability as I've described, because really you should write all the information first, then go back and make it pretty, then format the pretty document for printing. the universal method these days seems to be to start messing with fonts and margins first, then write what you want to write last, which is why so many books these days are crap. (anyone who buys roleplaying games will know exactly what I'm talking about.)
Yeah, yeah, sure, if you're collecting resumes from job-seekers who will bend over backwards to make a good impression, then you can force them to convert it for you. However, the bigger problem for me is submission requirements. In my writing class at college, the professor requires us to send Word attachments. A Windows or Macintosh PC with Microsoft Word is a requirement listed in the course syllabus.
Would RMS rather have me flunk the class because my professor has "become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly"? But hey, I bet if I explained that Word documents are "a major obstacle to the broader adoption of GNU/Linux", she'd be just fine with it.
You can bash MS all you want, but nothing for Linux can compete with MS Office. "Star Office sucks," he added...
MS has thousands of well-paid programmers working in a cohesive enviornment hacking away at their software days on end.
The free software community has a bunch of fat smelly hippies drinking Mountain Dew, programming on their free time.
I swear, RMS could tell people not to stick their fingers in a light socket, and they would actually have a desire to do so when he was done.
Now, I dislike Word just as much as the next guy, but for different reasons. First, there is the macrovirus issue. I don't like closed formats either, but that's a technical issue that a lot of people don't understand. Refer to Word as a "secret format" and people will think you are smoking crack. For Joe Blow, Word is not a secret format, "it's Word format. What's the secret?".
Instead, if I get this stuff, I say:
I don't use Word. Could you please send plain text or HTML.
That's it. No diatribe. No technical jargon. If this becomes the socially acceptable way to transmit documents, people will learn it because they are inconvenienced having to send the message twice, not because they want to join the Glorius People's Revolution, which most us would actually like to avoid. I wouldn't subject myself to PDF or any print-oriented format unless they said it was the only alternative. That's for a little ideological reason of my own: These formats are a PITA to read on the screen, and printing them out is bad for the environment. I have nothing personal against Adobe. If Reader were more screen friendly I wouldn't hesitate to suggest PDF.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've always just replied and requested that they resend their docs in RTF format. It has wide support and still maintains some level of formatting.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
Why doesn't there exist an open word processing document format? If such a thing existed, then we wouldn't have this problem. Plain text has no formatting. HTML has no pagination. PDF has no WYSIWYG editor. Couldn't some .doc-like format be developed and thereby solve this problem (because Microsoft may be forced to provide support for it in their own software?)
Over the past few weeks I've become increasingly convinced that Microsoft is astroturfing Slashdot ("I hate to say it, but Microsoft's XYZ does this and more!"), but this response is so over-the-top that it's clearly either astroturfed by a clueless droid or written by an idiot.
.nroff? Or Word Star? Or any of a dozen other applications?
Word processors predate MS Word by a LONG time. Ever hear of
Microsoft didn't invent word processors, or even WYSIWYG editors. Hell, Word was a pathetic joke for many, many revisions - back when there was a true market in word processors Word was an "also-ran."
But Word (and Office) came to dominate this market for one reason, and one reason only: it became mandatory. You buy a business class system from any major OEM, and it came bundled with Word. You could not get a system without it. Since everyone already had the software on their system, the PHBs didn't see any point in paying for a "second" word processing system.
Unless they actually have to deal with text for a living. E.g., I think most lawyers still use Word Perfect.
Fortunately, none of this matters since your world apparently started in the mid-90s when the last of the legacy competing tools became "also rans." That allows you to pretend that Office has no competition, and has never had any competition, than a few unnamed emacs knockoffs.
Here's a clue - the competition to Office isn't emacs, it's emacs + docbook + SGML processing tools. Office wins the "hello world!" competition, but my experience maintaining 50+ page technical documents is that DocBook is FAR easier to use than Office. Office is WYSIWYG, but it's terminal technology. Information goes in, but then it can't be processed by anything other than Office or Office add-ins. Docbook doesn't give me immediate feedback on what it will look like on the paper, but I can use any XML processing tool in the world to extract information from that document, to fold in additional information from outside, to scan the text for all uses of registered trademarks, etc. In the real world, that saves me *far* more time than the time I lose compiling DocBook to HTML or PS for review of the formatted material.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
In the current political climate, there are many who would consider it hateful to send documents using anything but Microsoft word. Like it or not, Microsoft Word is the de facto standard these days (personally, I'm not a big Word fan, but that's the reality.) People are being ultra-patriotic and Microsoft is a big symbol of American prosperity and innovation. It seems to me that you are being intentionally confrontational by going out of your way to send co-workers documents that they can't read, and you run the risk of having these co-workers label you un-American (or even terroristic.)
Consider this: Your co-workers and colleagues are not sending you Word files out of malice. They simply don't know any better. You, on the other hand, are intentionally sending them something that you know will not work, and in doing so, you are wasting network bandwidth and productivity (among other things.) Rather than being snotty about it, I would say that your time would be better spent educating your colleagues in a more productive manner. You can explain how to save files in a more portable format without having to send everybody in the office a couple of megabytes worth of Stallmanist gobbledygook. If you are diplomatic about it, your message has a much greater chance of being received and understood.
Oh, and before I forget: for the love of God, try to let people know that when they're sending out something that just consists of a few lines of text, just type it in the e-mail client! Nothing is more annoying than a blank e-mail with a Word attachment that is nothing more than a paragraph of text that could have just as easily gone in the body of the mail itself.
I use Word attachments every day. I couldn't do my job without them.
Is Word the best thing since sliced bread? No.
Is Word worth using? Yes.
The main thing I use Word for, besides all the fancy formatting stuff which is not even strictly necessary, is collaboration/reviewing. I write professionally, and I need to be able to track changes through several review cycles (editors, client, legal, publication). To my knowledge, no other widely-available word processing solution supports these features, at least not the extent the .doc format does.
But it's still not enough to make me use MSWord for all my editing (although I keep a copy in my VMware Win98 just in case). I use StarOffice 6 and love it. I really only have two qualms about it:
When I first switched to using Linux full-time for work, nobody at the office noticed. (I telecommute, so no one could actually see my desktop.) At the time, I was using Mandrake + KMail + StarOffice 5.2 -- the only one who knew about it was the editor directly above me, and he's cool with Linux. (Even he wouldn't have known if I hadn't told him.)
What I mean to say is: the Word .doc format has a number of very useful features I couldn't live without. But that doesn't mean I have to use Word. In Evolution, I can open Word attachments in StarOffice seamlessly -- and since StarOffice doesn't quite support VB, I've yet to find a document which could cause damage to my system.
I do agree, however, that you shouldn't use .doc files when something simpler or lighter (like plain text) would do the job as well. I'm involved with PR, and I've seen embarrassing things happen to clients when someone stupid converts a Word doc to HTML and posts it on their site. One page had internal tracking info in the title which actually referred to a different project which had been used as source material. On the website, this information was paraded across the title bar.
Tangent: why does Word include a "title" field in the document properties which it never displays to the user? Word's titlebar just shows the filename without path -- for me, a completely useless piece of informaiton, since I often have identically-named but very different files in separate sections of my file tree. StarOffice's title bar (which displays the contents of the "title" field) is much, much better... yet another reason to use .doc, and just not use M$Word.
Hey, sorry to ramble on like this.... just my two and a half cents.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
I believe in the Open Source movement; however, one thing is for certain most people don't work for free. I don't, I'll be first to admit I do not share in some lofty idea that I would like to change the world for free. Like most, I'd rather make a pile of dough and change the world around me with that pile.
.doc format is proprietary. One can save document from Word as an HTML file. It is free for Word users, and it saves them from the wrath of Open Source users. Clearly the thing to do is to include instructions on how to do a "Save As HTML" for the user. Of course those of you living in an Open Source vacuum probably would not know how to do this. From Office 2000, click on "File" and then select "Save As Web Page."
.doc of your resume to. I run Red Hat at home, and work with HPUX and AIX so I'm not just some Microsoft advocate. I believe in "use the best tool for the job at hand." If you want the job, just do what they want, why fight the system? Because they won't fight back, you just won't get the job.
Apart from that rant, I'd like to say that there is a compromise here. What RMS does not state explicitly is that the point here is the
One final comment I'd like to make to all those Unix Admins, Unix Programmers, and Unix Whatevers out there. I find it pathetic that in search of a job you cannot find MS Word to just save a
I think we should start lobbying for Ethics laws.
As the world moves towards more corporatism, ethics seem to never enter the picture here.
The true solution to this problems is for Microsoft to recognize itself as a leader, and act responsibly instead of greedily. They should realize that since documents are no good if not shared, and things get emailed more often than they get printed anymore, that they have to make the default a shareable format.
I profit-mongering company will never do that. So, profit-mongerers should not allowed to be in leadership positions.
Oh well, hopeless romanticism.
The very day that Microsoft starts generating RFCs on the MSWord format, then I have no problem with it in email.
Until that day, we should remind others that grafting MSWord into an email defeats the purpose of open-standards, and is yet another example of embrace-extend-extinguish. I'm somewhat surprised that RMS didn't point this issue out.
But then again, if we say this, then we should ban 3/4 of the available MIME types...
The problem here is that an average person does not care about making the future better for everybody. They just care about saving time and money. Now, an average linux user does care about making the future better for everyone, but linux users are few and far between. Instead of trying to guilt-trip the user into submission, it might be better to say,
>|<*:=
In a different era, the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute a person's wetware used to be known as the Spanish Inquisition. I can never read RMS seriously past his first use of the word freedom. Only the borg use the word freedom in the RMS sense.
Imagine I create a program that successfully predicts the stock market. No doubt RMS would want the source code for that application too. There's a large category of software which exists as the encoding of human expertise. Not since the Spanish Inquisition has society believed it had the right to extract human expertise from its native form of embodiment. How is it any different to demand the freedom of "inspection" when the same expertise is encoded as a program?
On the other hand, it has always been an MS strategy to drive in the thin edge of the wedge until they accumulate so much market and mind share that resistance is futile.
What this article fails to point out is that the wedge is a moving target. By the time the world organizes in opposition to Word documents, the only streaming format left on the internet (and universally embedded into all consumer devices) will be Windows Media.
As fast as you yank one testicle out of the noose, the other testicle is snagged. 50% of the internet is porn. Several of the people I know who still run Windows would be very upset not to be able to watch Don Cherry from the CBC website. There's a sizable audience out there who really don't how hard you squeeze the Word testicle.
Here's an idea for the next killer application: the Maya of home generated porno stills. In the 10GHz billion transistor era, this will become entirely feasible. What programmer from the open source community is going to brag on their resume that they authored the sticky liquid plug-in? I won't feel deprived if I never get to see the source code for this sordid venture.
As far as the guy who "couldn't" apply for a job because they demanded his resume in Word format, he should be seeing the glass half full: he was spared the agony of applying for a job he was only going to hate anyway.
See LyX or kLyX, that will fill many of your needs. I usually start files as LyX files then, when they get too big to easily handle in a WYSWIG editor, export to LaTeX and break the document up into multiple files and continue on in "raw" LaTeX from that point (it is quite easy to cut and paste out of an existing LaTeX doc, somewhat troublesome to create a LaTeX doc from scratch w/o a template).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not.
I don't think RMS uses MS Word. I have files originally saved in MS Word 5.1 Version for Macintosh that Word2000 still opens just fine.
Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files.
You mean they couldn't find a friend with MS Office & a connection to the Internet to send that file? How about just doing it at an Internet Cafe? Or a public library? Sorry, I find this extremely hard to believe.
And those "suggested replies" have the kind of condescending, arrogant tone that isn't likely to get you anywhere with most people. But, as someone else said elsewhere, RMS probably mostly sends these to reporters who will interview him anyway and who he can afford to piss off.
Good for him.
i'm a Mac person myself, so Office is available to me (I even "own" it, because it comes with your first tuition payment at Dartmouth), but I don't use Office (don't have it installed) because I prefer other (also nonfree) software (AppleWorks -- try not to laugh). so when I get a Word doc I do indeed have to ask people to send me another format. two good stories:
1.) once a female student here sent me a document for some reason which now eludes me. at that time i was still in the "open with BBEdit" phase (not yet in the "bitch the person out over blitz" phase) so i did that, only to find all sorts of text from other documents (we've all heard about this bug). it was funny stuff: snippets of a love letter this girl had once received from an EXTREMELY infatuated beau, let me tell you. so i responded to her with the text of the love letters, explaining the bug and how to avoid it, and she was HORRIFIED -- i wonder if she gave up Word? somehow i doubt it.
2.) one time a secretary in the office for my major (cs) emailed all the CS majors a Word doc with a message to the effect of "this is the most damn important file you'll ever receive as a major -- open it immediately and blah blah blah". i wrote her back and asked her to send it in RTF but i never heard from her again. i hope it wasn't TOO important, because it's been a couple years and i still don't know what was in that doc.
I've watched more than one home user fuss over a .doc file and become extremely frustrated with it. Why? Their 'standard' is Works. My solution is to contact the sender and ask for the file to be sent in a standard file format such as html or text and tell them that they can just use 'save as' to access these standard formats.
I can see why he would like to see the Word format disappear into something altogether more open, but it's a bit too late for that.
.doc file. Problem is, neither choice is going to happen. MS makes it difficult to reverse-engineer everything, and they refuse to open up their source (even under the order of the US courts for pity's sake!).
Fact: MS has the stronghold over business machines.
Fact: MS Office has the stronghold in the office suite market.
Fact: The people who send out MS Word documents blindly probably don't know that there is anything but Windows and Word.
The solution is not with the mailers. These users don't understand why other people can't read Word files ("Everyone I know does. And I can. So everyone must do.") and probably don't even know how to save it to something more compatible. We can't change the practices of these people for a reason that seems very obscure to them. The "MS Word only" mentaltality of CV submission is another matter, however. Bosses should know better.
The ball, therefore, lies firmly in the software side of the court. That leaves us with two players (and possibly some more sport analagies if we're lucky!), Microsoft and, well, The Rest of the Software World. Either Microsoft open up their standard, or everyone else rushes to reverse-engineer the
So, nothing will change. It's one thing to speak evangelically about something, it's another thing to get any result (politicans anyone?)
Oh how much fun I've had trying to convince many unix people to stop sending me corpressed uuencoded email and just send plain text.
This is just a dumb argument/editorial position. If windows does not have utility programs to read generic unix formats, how do unix bigots like RMS expect peoople to read anything other than plain text documents?
RMS should please retire to Tahiti along with the big ego 70s unix lamers and let the younger people work together.
I do own a copy of Windows (it came with one of my computers), and I do boot it occasionally to play games and such, but like most home users I do not own a copy of Office. (Many home users have a PIRATED copy of Office, but I don't believe in piracy as an effective solution to the problem of expensive proprietary software). I have no plans of buying Office anytime soon. But the person I am corresponding with need not know any of this. All he needs to know is that a) I don't own a copy of Office, and b) thus if he wants me to read his message, he better send it in plain text or HTML.
Why would you believe that my computer or operating system has anything to do with not running Word? I don't own Word because it is expensive and because free substitutes (such as StarOffice) fill what few word processing needs I have (I'm a programmer, not a secretary). But all of that is irrelevant.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
"And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. "
This statement is incorrect... Microsoft redefined the file format with Word 97 to make it extensible. SO the basic text, formatting, images, etc are all compatible between Word 97, 2000, and XP. I can save a Word file in WordXP and open it in Word 97 without any sort of conversion or downgrading... its just that the "extensions" not supported by Word 97 won't be displayed or might be displayed incorrectly.
The differences between 97 and 2000 are especially small... we have about 85% of our users on Office 97 and they exchange documents both ways with our other users of Office 2000. Of course they don't do anything special with fileformats (remember: these users think their keyboard can 'get a virus') -- the Word 97 users can open the Word 2000 files without conversion.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Chris's signature reads:
/.'ers, and Chris isn't set up for direct messaging.
"Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?"
But we ARE told, or can be told, when people moderate or follow up to one of our postings, as well as several other events of interest.
Just go Preferences -> Messaging -> Message Preferences. You can get email or Web notification.
Probably Chris set up this signature before that feature was added, but it's misleading now.
I admit this is offtopic for the current thread, but this is very useful info for
When a company asks for resumes in Word format they are doing that to ensure they receive a document they can read. If you have Windows 95 or better you can save a document in Word format using Wordpad. If you are a Linux, er GNU/Linux user you can save a document in a Word format using several common word processors. Its not really that hard. You can even save plain text to .doc and these folks who insist on using Word will be able to read it.
As far as RMS goes, he sees all commercial software as a threat to himself and to humanity. While I often use Linux and other free software at home I still like and use commercial software. Sometimes it is a lot easier being the buttress of the Microsoft monopoly than it is trying to figure out how to get your new word processor installed that requires libXYZ.3.2.1.3 without breaking your MP3 player that still relies on libXYZ.3.2.1.1.
'Same speed C but faster'
Bloat and bloat.. yes and no. You'd be hard pressed to actually edit the file in any sane way (this is not bloat, however9. As far as sizes go, no, not bloaty. Example: I have one 20181 byte long ascii file (Less than 100 bytes is layout control, the rest is actual file contents). The resulting PDF is 15696 bytes. Packed text, anyone?
If I start embedding fonts, they will grow quite a bit. If I refer to fonts (and hope the user has them - word style) it wont grow.
Kriss the AC..
Then add this line to your .mailcap file (or /etc/mailcap if you prefer).
#this allows you to read those obnoxious word attachments application/msword;antiword %s|less; \needsterminal; \ print=antiword -p letter %s|lpr Very handy; takes less time than opening a word document in Windows using MS-Word, and keeps my blood pressure low.
Ceci n'est pas un post
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail."
That's the bottom line. Remember the infamous "Halloween" Microsoft document that outlines the need to "embrace and extend" common file formats and protocols?
Here's another reason why:
.doc attachment, and it's 269312 bytes long, I save it as .rtf, and *bingo*, it's now only 77621 bytes long. Microsoft adds alot of stuff in the file format for objects and such, which isn't needed if you are simply trying to send content. If several people are co-authoring a document, they shouldn't do it via email anyway. Send a .rtf file to a Word user, and Word automatically recognizes it.
.doc files that reduce to KB+ files when saved as Rich Text Format. That's why *I* don't like to see .doc attachments.
I get a
I get these MB+
"To cure the illness, we must convince people not to send or post Word documents."
.doc files" and how "office is a propriety application and is evil"
Why? Linux users choose to be different than the majority of computer users. Also, Word/Office happens to be the most popular office package currently in existence.
If you want to convert users to free/open source solutions, instead of complaining about how it's not open-source (which doesn't mean anything to the typical user), build a better mouse trap.
You'll never convince users of switching or changing the way they do things without a massive re-education. The best way is to make it so your users (the open source ones) don't suffer and the users that are on the fence about switching are able to do so seamlessly.
This goes back to the old problem that Apple faced... and the reason why Office is the best selling piece of Macintosh software. Apple realized that without MS's Office package, they would lose the majority of their userbase because it IS the leading office package... this is the reason why the deal between MS and Apple (the agreement plus the investment) was instrumental in bringing Apple back to life.
There are still people out there that believe they can't switch to a macintosh because their office documents won't be readable by a mac. I still inform people that "yes, there is an MS Office package for the mac and yes, it will be able to read your word files." Another great piece of mac software back in the day was the one that converted PC formats to mac formats... sorry, but the name escapes me.
Apple realized from a business standpoint what it needed to do to move users over to their side and they did it in a non-political fashion by creating solutions that made transitions seamless. Linux software companies and development houses need to do the same thing instead of griping about how "you need to get your friends to stop sending you
Lots of people suggest that there's tons of features that "no one ever uses" - what they really mean is features "I never use".
Our office prepares a lot of fairly technical documents - and there's some features that our people never use. And some that I'm sure we use that you don't. And, and, and...
Here's some things that I've noticed render inconsistently in RTF:
1. A page which is partly in columns, partly not
2. Footers/headers
3. Bullets (especially numbered)
4. Dot leaders on tabs, decimal tabbing.
Someone will say: "It works fine when I do it..." Well, it doesn't when I do it. And these are all features we need.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
If someone wants a resume in word format, just send it to them in html format. They will most likely be too ignorant to know the difference.
Now it could be a problem, when they send you stuff back in word format.
Definitedly try Star Office 6 when it comes out (I think they're saying somewhere between April and June now). The beta was pretty nice and did a darn good job with those pesky Word Docs. Plus, you can run it under Windows or Unix, which IMHO is a big advantage.
What is needed is a uniform file format that can be read cross-platform and with a different Word Processor. Star Office 6 with it's XML based file format is getting towards that goal (although I don't yet know of any 3rd party programs that can read it's files, the specs have been published in full so it shouldn't be that hard.) Sure you can just ask people to send you text/html/pdf files, but that really isn't a practical solution unless you're just dealing with plain text documents, no embedded spreadsheets, etc. If you're trying to colaborate with someone on a document, you'd darn well better be using the same format or the constant conversions are going to cause nightmares.
What would be the reaction by the open source community if MS released a closed source but free version of Word for Linux? I am not saying that I am for or against such an idea, nor do I think it will happen before the apocalypse, I just want to know what people would think of it.
As for RMS's article, It is a noble cause but I am afraid it is doomed. There are too many govt. and business organizations that rely on Word out of directive or ignorance. Those that do know and care don't have the time to retrain users, because even though it is a simple idea most users won't care enough to remember.
And PDF? come on, that is just as inconvenient as Word, it requires a special reader. I am all for text or RTF, HTML is even 'OK', maybe XML if there is a real standard and not a MS spec. standard.
PS I hate Front Page too.
"Waitress I need two more boat-drinks..."
R T F
ScienceSeeker.org
Much easier to just say something like "The document you sent came through corrupted, I've had this problem before with MS Word format files. Can you please resend the document in X format? You can tell MS Word to save in this format under the "SaveAs" option. Thanks."
It's a bit simplistic and perhaps not 100% true but everyone will understand what you're saying, will sympathise, and they might even repeat your bit of wisdom to others.
"Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?"
/. universe, editors have powers that mere mortals do not. They can moderate without end, bitchslap, etc. They are users, but they are not just users, and knowing that an editor is moderating your posts is important, particularly for knowing if those editors are abusing their unlimited mod points.
You missed the most important word -- editors.
Yes, I know I can be notified when "people" moderate my posts. I want to know if that "person" was an "editor". The logic that "editors are users, and thus the notification that it was a user is correct" is factually true but ignores the important issue. In the
All I want is some accountablity for editors on slashdot. It was only just recently that I changed my signature because I decided this was an issue, particularly after reading CmdrTaco's dismissive response to the bug report.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's a shame, as XHTML and CSS allows for very clean separation of content from presentation...
Not to be picky, but XHTML and CSS do not separate content from presentation exactly. All XHTML is, is well-formed HTML. Which basically means, if you open a paragraph tag (<P>) you have to close it (</P>), and you can't have overlapping tags.
This allows browsers to more easily interpret the HTML because the structure is not ambiguous as it is in a lot of HTML code...
It also allows for better scripting with things like DHTML and so forth, because the structure is solid.
However HTML still uses tags that are all about the presentation: <P> (paragraph) <H1> (header 1) etc.
Now what you may have been thinking of would be using XML and CSS. This would clearly separate the content (XML) from the presentation (CSS). And oh how the web would benefit from having all of its content in XML, with standard DTDs, formatted using CSS or XSL. Warms my heart to think about it! =) The added search capabilities would be astounding... anyway...
Mark
You get a word file. Open it in something that does not read word files. You should still see some text in there. Save the file in an open format of your choice, including all the nastiness that word puts in there. Why should you clean it up? They sent it to you that way. Then send the file back.
I've been doing that with a writing group I'm involved with. I open their files, read what I can, make my comments, than save as rtf to send back to them. I recently had a reply from one of them asking what was up with the file because he didn't send it to me that way. I simply explained that I don't use word and that he did in fact send it to me that way.
RTF looks nice enough for most folks I deal with, the problem with it is that like everything else MS has "embraced and extended" the format. So RTF files from MS don't always work elsewhere.
Whiners complaining about jobs: If you want the job, do what it takes to get it. If your hungry and about to be evicted from your home, complaining that the company you want to work for only accepts word files is stupid. Get over it.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Halleluyah!!
.NET going to make this with it's services based model *sigh*. Auto-update everyone with a new Word format and everyone on the other side of the fence is left stranded.
.LIT one while we're at it
:->
I said this in 1994!
M$Word is good because it enables people to convey more than text - scientific notation, simplifying standard layouts between people and embedding useful information. It lets people do things quicker than having to type them out.
I have to agree with Mr. Stallman though. It's not good on more levels.
I won't even go into GUID land here...
Until Microsoft open it up and stop obfuscating to remain in control all they create is something which is useful now but redundant with the next version they throw out.
Unfortunately the corporate world is still pretty entrenched in Microsoft products until they see the benefits of a free operating system that does the job and makes them money.
It needs to be advertised to the right people when it's proven to be solid and have features which are used most of the time and not just code candy.
Which would you buy ? Something cheaper with less features or something that costs more with more features that you seldom use and that everyone else uses ?
So Microsoft can create new versions and change the format thereby forcing an upgrade at their whim.
How easy is
Side note:
I wish the "underworld" would release a M$Word->HTML Perl script... and a
but I guess that violates the DMCA you Americans are so proud of
If editors can moderate our posts without triggering the email notification, that's wrong, I didn't know it, and I apologize & agree they should fix it.
they strip out all the style formatting, convert it to courier, etc.
I have seen what agencies do to people's CVs - make them look completly amateurish and kludgy. When I saw the mess my former employer received I was surprised they interviewed me! People who sent CVs direct were allowed to make them pretty :-)
Dear Mr. Stallman,
Your overly "closed-minded" and selfish approach to a simple obstacle has confirmed our suspicion that you are an idiot.
When you come to work on Monday, you will find that your security card has been disabled. Please contact the security team for an escort into the building, they will be expecting you. You will have 30 minutes to clear your personal belongings from the building and un-ass the premises.
For future reference, the world owes you nothing. If you choose to use a non-industry standard word processor, please expect to put up with, and overcome, such trivial inconveniences.
>You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format so it is hard for me to read.
>If you send me plain text, HTML,
>or PDF, then I will read it.
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
The real problem with RMS, is his underlying ethos. He is an elitist. An elitist believes 1) that he is/knows better than everyone whom does not sheepishly and blindly agree with them, and 2) that in the end, he does not have to follow the very dictates he places into policy, law or order. While obviously RMS would happily follow his own law that 'no one can EVER use MS products', the real issue is actually not MS usage (which is a specific example of implementation) but is rather (and he does indeed state this from time to time) the freedom of choice for all users. Now it does not take a genious to figure out that if he then proposes any sort of restriction on what the user or creator can actually implement, then he has gone against his primary purpose. Furthermore, it does not take a linguist to know that there is a special word for this type of person, HYPOCRIT.
I see the same problem with RMS as any of the slavering liberals of the world. They do much more harm in turning off people from their stated (but not actually followed) causes, and furthermore harm the issue because they cause an acceptance of lies, fabricated facts, misrepresented (and overrepresented) facts, ommisions of undesirable facts and basically encourage sheepish behaviour in 'the masses'.
Have you ever been wrongfully accused by a police officer for speeding? Do you think that you could successfully prove your innocence (this is assuming you are indeed innocent, not just pissed off you got busted) if you approached the judge spitting in his/her face saying a lot about "oppression", "the Man", "the Establishment", "the Military-Industrio Complex", etc.? No, I doubt it myself. Actually, a rational and logical approach that pointed out facts would not only enlighten the judge to the mistake, but could indeed enlighten you as to how mistakes like this can indeed happen (which is why there is the option of a trial). For that matter, try riding with a cop a couple of times, it is amazing what they put up with, and you can then see why the 'system' is the way it is. Too many street lawyers that screw things up for everyone... hmmm, I see a pattern there. The need to police ourselves.
Most posters here have missed the main point. And though RMS makes some very good points on the political side of things, he still misses the main point.
What if MS Word were Free Software? Would it then be okay to send all your email with MS Word? NO!
Email should always be formatted in a text format such as plain text or HTML. The only attachments in non-text format should be either media files or with the prior permission of the receiver. This is common courtesy. I don't care if the email is formatted in MS Word, AbiWord or OpenOffice. If I get it I will delete it.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
( I've been critical, very critical of RMS in the past. My motivation for writing this post isn't to put him through the meat-grinder..I'm merely addressing some points that weren't addressed in his article.)
" Don't you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages? Word attachments are annoying, but worse than that, they impede people from switching to free software. Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."
If these people happen to be your friends, sure. But any sysadmin who's worked more than an hour in any professional capacity can tell you that people simply don't understand email. Yes, to you and I, we know about RFCs, the fact that the email infrastructure of the net was never meant to handle anything but raw ASCII.. They don't know these things, nor do they care to learn why sending binaries via email is a bad idea. They just want to send 80MB
IMHO, what needs to happen is a revamping of the email infrastructure to the net, to turn it into a binary-friendly medium. Its a kludge to do anything short of that. Providing HTML links to binaries stored at the originator's machine, MIME, UUEncode/UUDecode are are simply methods of sidestepping the issue and putting a band-aid on a garden hose. As a side note, the same "effort" you speak of could be directed at revising badly out of date protocols like FTP as well. FTP is a NAT-ignorant protocol.. Good luck trying to move data in anything but an Active mode.
" Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it. And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. They may even find, several years from now, that the Word documents they are writing this year can no longer be read with the version of Word they use then."
Lame as it is, this is Microsoft's right. If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product. If you don't like the design of their product, you are welcome to come up with something better, as the folks behind AbiWord, KWord, StarOffice and others have done. In my opinion, Microsoft has done an exemplary job in allowing users to import legacy documents. Infact, you'll still have the ability to import documents from MS Works, a cheapo text-based version of MS Office that ran on DOS systems more than a decade ago. I've personally never encountered the sort of situation you're describing. Besides, if they opened up the standard and described how Word documents are formed, any number of parties (ourselves included) would ultimately pervert the standard, intentionally or not. I'm glad they keep that door shut. Theres only one version of Microsoft Word 2002 documents--Not 18 different ones, all slightly different from one another.
"Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous."
The government also requires us to ride on/in motor vehicles when we use the highways, regardless of the fact your bike will get you from Point A to Point B. Infact, if you tried to ride a bike on an expressway, you'de be pulled over within minutes, fined, and/or carted off to jail. Whether we like it or not, Word is the standard when it comes to the exchange of formatted electronic documents. That may change. It has in the past, and will likely continue to do so in the future. Even today, we're already moving away from statically formatted Word-like documents and into more sophisticated markup-based documents like HTML/XML. Don't whine about not being to ride your bike on the expressway. Its illegal because nobody wants the disruption and inconvenience... The same reasons rest behind why Word is the current standard format for electronic business documents. It prevents disruption and inconvenience for everyone to agree upon the best standard available at the time the decision is made.
"Example No. 1: You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it."
If you say this to anyone in a business environment, two things will happen. They'll think youre friggin crackpot, and they'll be less inclined to conduct any further business with you. Get serious..The way to get to your goal, Richard, is not to retroactively repeal the existing standard in favor of ye olden days of document exchange. Develop a BETTER standard than Word, make it available to all so that they'de be crazy not to implement it, and in so doing force Microsoft to conform to it. After all, they had to do so with HTML, did they not? And JPEG? And GIF? And DivX, and MPEG, and Java...the list goes on and on.. None of these formats were created by Microsoft, yet, Microsoft was forced into adopting support for them simply due to their popularity and pervasiveness. BMP didn't win out over JPEG. PCX didn't win out over GIF. Get the picture? The best way to get where you wanna go is to put one foot infront of the other and enjoy the slow march of progress and adaptation, not to turn around and do backwards somersaults of disruption till you get there.
This argument was terribly misguided. It identifies a problem that doesn't exist, and suggests and equally pointless and disruptive method of fixing it. I didn't buy a CueCat then, and I'm sure as hell not gonna buy a CueCat now.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
At the risk of bludgeoning the obvious to a pulpy mess...
:)
This wouldn't be an issue if people used the simplest possible format, most suited to the message. Ideas need well-constructed sentences and paragraphs, separated wisely by whitespace. Fonts and colors frequently serve to disguise poor writing and badly organized thoughts.
At work anything that smells like a document arrives as a Word doc, and anything vaguely tabular becomes an Excel spreadsheet. Why wait for a huge, and expensive, application to load, only to reveal that the information is irrelevant?
If you absolutely need a more advanced presentation then step up to HTML. Just make sure you are improving communication, not decoration.
So there.
I enter text in Katakana or French, it appears magically in my program after being utf-8ed (and possibly LempelZived). Meanwhile our US operation doesn't even support Spanish, which is a major language in their country!
Personally, I think it is better to avoid political issues and focus on security. Here is my revision of RMS's #2 with this in mind. Comments welcome.
Am I the only person here who reads word files with less?
garbage garbage garbage
text text text
garbage garbage garbage
What's cool about this is that all of the stuff that was deleted is still in there for me to read Mostly just bad sentences and stuff though.
Hahaha :-)
XML is a standard format in the same way that "binary" is a standard format.
XHTML on the other hand might be useful...
How is that in any way on-topic? How does that in any way address the issues raised? Why is this post not moderated down to "off-topic"?
Just configure your incoming MTA to dump word files and pass the remainder of the message on to the user. Then you can easily complain that the word file didn't get to you, and if you (and enough other people) keep complaining, the remainder will get the idea soon enough. Just call it part of a good firewall to protect your network against viruses.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
To create a bulleted list in RTF using MS word, you need to disable automated bulleted lists. Another example of sloppy one-size-fits-all MS programming.
ScienceSeeker.org
grafting MSWord into an email defeats the purpose of open-standards, and is yet another example of embrace-extend-extinguish
Microsoft isn't attaching word documents to emails, users are. Users don't want to E-E-E, they want to exchange information.
Hogsback
I agree with all your points, except the one about the need for a programming language in the application.
Although the choice of language may be up for debate, I think on of the good points about Word, or Emacs which I personally prefer (It's been years since I've used Word on a regular basis), is the fact that they allow extensions to be made without changing the app itself. While I think that open source is a great thing, it helps a lot to be able to express the things you want to do with a program in terms of that program, rather than in terms of the implementation language/environment. It also should help in portability and maintainabillity, since the app may keep it's interface relatively stable (or just backwards compatible).
And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release
No it doesnt.
may even find, several years from now, that the Word documents they are writing this year can no longer be read with the version of Word they use then.
Last I checked Word could open ancient documents from all sorts of different word processors.
Regardless of the truth of the rest of the statements, someone like me (programmer, sends HTML mail as it looks nicer, etc) is never even going to give it a chance, if I see so many innacuracies like that in the first few paragraphs. He just comes of looking like yet another YALZ (Yet Another Linux Zealot).
People use word. I use word. 9x% of people use word. Get over it. If you can't interoperate with the rest of the population, doesnt it make it your problem, not theirs?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
>"Then again you could just download the free Word Viewer from Microsoft. Then you wouldn't need to inconvenience yourself or the sender of the document."
First, you imply that he should download (that could takes minutes on a slow connection) and install yet another program simply to read text that probably could be sent as plain text *in the first place*. That's annoying and stupid at best.
Second, I don't have Office at home either, and I'm sure not gonna download nor install WordViewer. If you need to tell me something, type it directly in the email. And you better not send me a damn HTML email either, I'm not using Outlook nor Outlook Express. A real Email is plain ASCII, like it or not.
Third, Sending a Word document is like saying "you *should* be using Windows and you *should* have Office. Wow, I need to spend more than 500$CAD just to be able to receive TEXT via EMAIL now.
I'm pretty sure you'll buy a Microsoft car, won't mind driving on MS-approved-only roads and streets, and won't mind paying 5 times as much for MS-approved gaz either.
Indifference to monopoly is as bad as supporting it. That's the point.
If I sent a Word attachment to someone and they mailed me with "I am puzzled. Why did you choose to send me 876,377 bytes in your recent message when the content is only 27,133 bytes?" I would reply, "I am puzzled. Why did you choose to be an obnoxious dickhead when all you wanted is for me to send you a non-Word file?"
At the end of the article, Stallman's #3 reply says:
.doc format?
"Microsoft can (and did recently in Kenya and Brazil) have local police enforce laws that prohibit students from studying the code, prohibit entrepreneurs starting new companies, and prohibit professionals offering their services."
I've not seen this in the news.
Can anybody provide a link to specifics concerning what MS did in Kenya and Brazil to stop acedemic study of their
----
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
RMS is absolutely correct that the document format issue is one of the biggest obstacles to adoption of "free" and other non-MS operating systems, programs, etc. (and thus one of the biggest factors perpetuating the MS operating system and application monopolies), though his examples are a little over-the-top for use by normal people.
In my following of the MS antitrust case, I have not seen any evidence of the U.S. Gov't or the States taking much action against MS as a supplier to the Gov't. For example, the Federal or a State Gov't could (i) cease purchasing software from MS (I am sure many states have laws prohibiting companies that have broken specified laws from being a contractor to the state) or (ii) (if (i) is too drastic) require communications with or within the Gov't to be made in "open" formats. The Gov't has the advantage of being able to set standards that its customers have to live with. Perhaps if enough Gov'tal units mandated open formats, they would be adopted in the private sector more readily. Does anyone know whether the U.S. or any states have taken actions along these lines?
PS: Has there been an Ask Slashdot lately regarding the status of open document format projects?
Remember the Golden Rule of the net: "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept."
The proper Net approach in my view would be to promulgate as much free software as possible that (a) converts Word to something else on input if you like, and (b) makes it easy to create and attach free-format documents to all the popular MUA's.
Browbeating other users with "I refuse to read that, send it differently" replies is rude and counterproductive.
>"Microsoft Word owns your sorry text editor asses! Why can't you Linux dorks just accept the fact that Microsoft has totally beaten your lame excuse for an operating system! Shave your silly beards and join the winning team, you freaks."
As soon as you give me the money to buy the computer that new Microsoft software requires, as well as money for the software.
Wasting more money on software than hardware seems upside-down to me, especially when I get quality hardware but shitty, unstable, bloated and unsafe software.
Have a nice day.
Gah. RMS tilting at windmills again, what a huge surprise. In this case I happened to be sypathetic, albeit for different reasons, so how about this:
Hi!
I received your email, but unfortunately our security scanner strips out Microsoft Office formats due the fact that they are known to carry macroviruses. Could you please resend your document in plain text format?
just like PDF files.
The widespread use of RTF would do more to facilitate Open Source than PDF files. Unlike PDF, RTF files are editable by almost any word processor. This not only solves problems for Linux users, but for many Windows users because there are serious incompatibilies problems between versions of Word's DOC formats for complex documents. For those who need or want Windows, RTF use helps free them from the M$ upgrade treadmill.
The only downside that I see for RTF vs. PDF is that complex formatting like embedded pictures, equations, complicated tables in RTF documents are usually ignored by Linux word processors, so they could not be viewed properly. This will improve as these word processors get more mature themselves.
The development of good file conversion software for Word documents, including RTF, is a crucial piece of the Open Source struggle!
John
Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born there. (GBS)
Maybe he should have said "LaTeX" ?
I agree that LaTeX is awesome, the learning curve is a bit steep but once past that, you'll be churning out documents so fast, you'll run rings around the poor souls dragging a mouse in word and friends.
(although you may fuck up your terminal when you try to read it using "more". Been there, done that.)
A few ways to fix it quickly. Either more the file again and just watch the bottom for when (Gibberish --More--(X%)) becomes normal --More--(X%). When it does, hit Q.
Normal Terminal again.
Ever heard of Wordpad?
Yeah, it's a 179k program that comes with Windows, and has absolutely no problem reading and writing RTF formats.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
In other words, LyX can be used for large files, but my personal editing style and LyX don't mix when it comes to long files. So I generally go with LyX until things get painful, then convert to LaTeX and go on from there.
Of course, any MS Word loser is not going to have this problem. I have used MS Word to write documentation at work. To put it bluntly, if it sucked anymore it would have met the qualifications to be a White House intern during the Clinton Administration (grin). LyX is much easier to use for technical documentation as compared to MS Word, mostly because it sticks with the bare necessities of content rather than bells and whistles.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
WHY (oh why) are we so dependant on the file name!?
.txt file cannot be an executable. Probably even a way to change file associations so that it runs them instead of opening in Notepad.
All your documents are belong to Microsoft.
Works with a plain text file, too.
No reason a
- Go into notepad, emacs, or whatever your favourite text editor is.
- Write up your résumé in neatly formatted ASCII.
- Save it on disk, making sure the file name extension is
.doc, not .txt. - E-mail it off as an attachment to your prospective employer.
Any version of M$ Word will render your file neatly, without visible conversion steps -- in Courier New, a monospaced font, so that your neat ASCII formatting will not break. Your employer cannot complain because you did send aThis might be a remnant of the old DOS days (before Word became the "standard"), when many software packages included documentation in ASCII format, with the .doc extension being an abbreviation of "documentation". So, in order to assimilate the .doc extension for their own proprietary format, M$ had to make sure to be backwards compatible and display ASCII .doc correctly, essentially making plain ASCII a subset of the M$ Word format.
While I agree with the ideology underscoring RMS's message, I thinking his method of preaching is too much of exactly that - preaching - to come across to the size of target audience he intends to reach.
Perhaps a little less use of mantras, perhaps a bit more sparing use of words with powerful stigma attached to them, and a slightly more pragmatic approach will woo those who are less high-minded.
How about sending your reply as a full page, nicely formatted StarOffice document attachment? If they complain, you can tell them, "It's a free download. Just go over to www.sun.com/staroffice. It's not like I'm asking you to go get a $334.99 piece of software to read what I wrote." Maybe they'll really think about whether attaching Word documents is really a cool thing to do.
It would be interesting market research to see how many home users had actually purchased MS Office, but I'm not interested enough.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
And here I thought RMS was going to stop adding 'GNU' to everything. aka GNU/Linux
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
And then there was the time he did all that, plus make a web page showing the same content...
Maybe I should join the Slashdot staff? ;)
All about me
RMS sez:
"the worst impact of sending Word format is on people who might switch to free systems"
Feh. The *worst* impact is that MSWord is one of the most common vectors for virus propagation. The second worst is that it forces the recipient back onto the treadmill of endless upgrades if the sender uses a newer version of Word.
People who want to switch to free systems can do so at any time; sending them Word documents only prevents them from getting rid of MSWord altogether.
I don't use Word myself, and frequently have to tell people not to send me stuff in that format, but RMS overstates his case.
"I'm sorry but I don't open doc fils because of the potential for viruses"
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
You know, that might be true but M$.DOC is much extended and constantly varying.
This brings us to another problem, RTF too is a M$ file format that's constantly being "extended", and is therefore imposible to catch. I've read many times here that the RTF format specifications provided by M$ are incomplete and won't work. I know from experience that M$ Write, also known as WordPad, will not always read a RTF produced by Word. If you check MS RTF documentation, you will see that .doc is actually just the binary format of RTF.
Heck, these days M$ can?t even get ASCII right MSDash they add strange characters to their fonts when perfectly good American Standard Code for Information Interchange exists.
Post Script, Portable Document File specifications are much much better than RTF. If you check MS RTF documentation, you will see that .doc is actually just the binary format of RTF. The result, as all of us know, is formating that changes with fonts available on the local machine and what printer is being used. PDF and PS don't have these problems.
Only a M$ shill would propose the use of inferior, propraitory and secret formats as M$ produces.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Even if you don't actually sell them the service, you've given them valuable advice and underscored the fact that this type of knowledge is why they pay you.
Why waste a lot of time sending polite replies to fools that send doc files and expect you to read hem? Its only a few line fix to sendmail to exclude such files.
While I don't get enough doc files to bother filtering on, I did get quite a bit of HTML spam. In fact, all the HTML was spam, which prompted me to filter it out from my endmail.mc as such:
HContent-Type: $>CheckContentType
SCheckContentType
R$+ $: $(ParseCT $1 $: $)
R $@ OK
R$* $#error $: 553 HTML mail not accepted here -- Please resend as plain text
I'm sure a similar fix could be done for doc files.
The PDF File Format Specification is available from Adobe as ... PDF!
This means that if you want to implement a PDF reader for a new computer/OS, all you need is an editor, a compiler and a PDF reader.
In his article, he clearly mentions sending mail in HTML as an option. Sure, HTML is readable, but HTML is for WWW, HTTP, port 80, not mail. I never read HTML formatted mail, it goes straight to /dev/null without exceptions.
How about the rest of you? Should one expect every user to have an HTML-enabled mail client or
strip/read the file manually?
I don't understand why people are advocating the use of RTF. RTF is nice until the document contains pictures. You thought ~200k Word documents sucked? Wait what 1,5MB RTF attachments do to your disk quota!
.doc. Nonetheless the sending of attachments should be kept to a bare minimum. Documents that are to be shared should be put on some webserver (when available) and a hyperlink should be mailed so the recipient can get the file at his own convenience.
The nice thing about PDF is that it, in the majority of cases, is smaller in size than
No, he isn't. This is exactly the problem I have. There is no MS Office suite where I work, and I am not going to get it illegally. So when I'm asked by some 3rd party to submit something in *.doc format, it is always a problem. Ditto for receiving the *.doc.
And so I agree with RMS. Plain ASCII text, HTML, or PDF. If you have the tools to create PDF files.
There are people who listen when I tell them about the alternatives. Every time a new MS virus, a BSOD, or another of your friendly Microsoft bugs comes up, I mention to some of the person(s) involved that there are alternatives, be it Mozilla, OpenOffice, or even full-blown linux install. These products have advantages (other than being free) that the Microsoft "de facto" standards just don't have, tabbed browsing comes to mind for Mozilla.
These things aren't for everyone. But a lot of my CS friends here at MSU, my girlfriend, and my brothers (who are budding computer geeks like me) know that there are alternatives. It takes patience and care, and you have to really believe that the stuff is better, but Microsoft does give you plenty of ammo. You just have to wait for it.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Dear user:
.doc
.. (insert a very simple description of how to change preferences here) ..
.doc about this too. I don't want you getting any viruses from the 'attachments" to the email that you get.
.doc in thousands of email accounts.
.doc is a virus.
Thanks for your email. I didn't open it because I was worried about viruses. Sometimes they get into my computer in a email like the one you sent to me.
I'm also a little worried about your computer. Some emails that you get could give your computer a virus. The emails that you have to worry about have something called an "attachment." Not all "attachments" are bad but you might have trouble with an "attachment" ending in
There is a good way to keep this from happening. It's pretty easy to do and it won't damage anything.
This is what you do. There is a button to click in
You might tell other people who send you email with "attachments" ending in
Thanks
I believe that an approach like this could result in a powerful user virus. This user virus could erase all the
Remember users,
...you've either got to deal with the huge mess that is Word's "Save as HTML" or you lose all the pretty formatting (which does sometimes include important diagrams or tables) when it's saved as text.
.ps from a .doc in Word, choose File, Print ..., select the Print to file checkbox and from the Printer pull-down select the Apple LaserWriter Select 360. Hitting Print will generate a .prn file. Just rename it to .ps and send it off. You may need to undo those changes the next time you want to print normally however.
.ps file with ghostview (gv) in the Unix environment.
Install an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 printer. You don't actually need a physical printer to do this. You just want to make the driver available. This only needs to be performed once.
To generate
Now the user can open the
see attached.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Use LaTeX!
Say, does that mean my Saturn is open-source?
Sample:
El mensaje último!
That would be misleading, since no kernel can open Word documents. It's the job of a word processing application. Now we don't want to confuse people stupid enough to use Windows and Word even more, do we? :-)
and send him a thank you note in Rich Text Format
Well, there's the DMCA requirement of EFFECTIVE controls...
This is a pet peeve of mine. The word "effective" has more than one definition, and the one used in the DMCA is not the one you're using. Under the DMCA, ROT-13 does effectively control access blah, blah, blah.
The problem with some of RMS's reasonings and language is that they will be lost on many people who have no desire to see source code, or may not even know what source code is.
The reasons that we can give people to not use word that most people will understand are simple:
1) Word docs can carry Viruses
2) By sending in Word format, you may be forcing the recipient to buy or upgrade MS Word when they have no desire to do so, if they want to read attachments like this, therefore sending corresponce in Word form, it is possible that the recipient will either ignore it, or possibly even become aggrivated
3) It is in your best interest to promote the disuse of Word in email, unless you enjoy paying for forced upgrades to Word every year or two.
4)Acceptable alternatives to Word docs include HTML, PDF, RTF, and TXT. MS Word can produce many of these formats.
We're not asking people to stop using Word, we just ask them to learn the "Save As" function.
But why stop at Word? I can deal with most word attachments with some alternative, but Excel and Powerpoint files are a bigger annoyance!
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
you open source zealots just never gets it. The world at large don't really care about writing or hacking C codes. RMS is living a delusionary life that the world revolves around coding, he should get a real life with wife and kids and join the rest of humanity and stop forninating with PCs
they sell a paper copy. check your favorite book store for ordering.
I say we make all email programs only accept plain text and thats it. If you need to do something more, make a page and send a link as text.
I really see no reason why we have html email, its a waste of bandwidth. I would be very happy if the only emails I saw were plain text, I dont need animated gifs in my email, I dont need your webpage sent to me in email everyday (thanks mp3.com)..
Ah well, the corporate people here at work love sending out emails that are just covered in animated gifs, clipart, sounds, all sorts of crap.. seems like a waste of time/space to me.
I once received a email with an attachment.
The attachment was a ZIP file;
The ZIP file contained a powerpoint presentation;
The presentation had a single slide;
The only thing on the slide was a BMP picture;
The picture consisted of a scanned image
Of...
a printed email message!
With the next StarOffice/OpenOffice outputting files in native XML, I expect/hope to see the typical document format standardizing on fully interchangable XML in the next few years.
Right now there is not an _implemented_ solution out. But once things start going XML, I think even general users will demand it.
Once the new StarOffice comes out, I am going to start sending all document attachments to people in XML format. If Word wont deal with them, then hopefully the general user population will start forcing Microsoft to 'innovate' in that direction.
Word's format hasn't changed since Word 97, no? Also, I don't have Office XP, but I could have sworn I had heard that you could save Word files as XML files. Is this not the case?
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
They have submitted RFC's on the MS WOrd format. Their submissions were answered with:
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we are unable to publish it in its current format. Please resend the attachment as plain text.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Or just do printf '\017'
Alternatively, echo ^V^O
(that's control-v control-o, and substitute your favorite lnext character for control-v).
Or use whatever other way you want to output a Control-O (ASCII Shift In).
Is RTF a "wonderful new open source document format"
Hogsback
Yes, Windows is so easy to use that no-one bought the Windows for Dummies book. Your analysis is flawed. Windows is used by nearly everyone because that is what comes with the PC, and because the choice of applications (which has nothing to do with the quality of the OS) is much greater. It's the barrier to entry that keeps Windows where it is and Microsoft have done everything possible, legal and illegal, to keep that barrier high.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Many corporations and home users use MS Office XX and force the rest of us to either get programs to view the information or get the actual program itself. Those of us in the FSF community might want to start sending our attachments out in an open standard and force peopel to use readers to read our documents from email. It seems a little sly but it might get open document standards a push that it can really use.
I work with fucking idiots who still put two paragraph breaks between paragraphs. Gawd! And don't even get me started on the idiots use multiple tabs.
- I like to use a font called Book Antiqua that hasn't been installed by default with Office since version 95.
- Printer information, including print margins, paper size, tray number, all screw things up just enough to risk major visual changes (or annoying problems like the document printing from the letterhead tray) at the other end. It's quite easy for an increase in printable area (or a change in font, see above) to result in two free-floating boxes printing on top of each other on the first page, rather than one on the first page and one on the second.
- Word attachments can contain viruses. I'm always aware of this whenever I'm forced to send one, even though I keep my anti virus software up to date on a daily basis. I'm particularly careful when I receive one, typically only opening it in "Wordpad".
Meanwhile, my main email address runs through Spamcop which I have setup to strip any and all attachments (there's a warning in my emailI typically send out my CV as an Acrobat file. About 20% of the time I'm asked for a Word version. That's fine, I've got Word 97 installed and it's what I actually used to write the CV in the first place. I downgraded from 2000 recently and I'm much happier.
Why do you need a new one when the existing ones work just fine?
The main point of your parent post was that you couldn't get a pre-compiled open-source word processor for Windows.
RTF is a well documented format. While Wordpad isn't open-source, it handles RTF just fine. What does anything have to do with a new file format? The article certainly doesn't.
And would I hope your grandmother can use Wordpad.
Plus, if you insist on having an open source word processor on Windows, Sun plans to release the source code to StarOffice soon.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
What do clueless managers have against plain text?
This is an arrogant shameless plug, but I've got a document on this issue which also addresses the "de facto" standard question. It is available in a number of formats
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I've recently given in and bought a Mac. The main reason I did this is that I want the power of Unix, but I needed MS Office.
Say what you like about the open source tools out there (Abiword, StarOffice, etc.) they DO NOT allow you to collaborate on documents with coworkers and clients. In most cases, I could open them, but on saving them certain formatting that my client / coworker had included were lost.
In the academic world in which RMS and a lot of Linux / Free Unix enthusiasts live, you can get away with telling people to sod off and resend the doc as an RTF. Even for the several years of being a sysadmin I was normally able to get away with it.
However when you become a manager and are responsible for company revenue things change. My clients have tender documents as word templates. If I cannot use those, I cannot tender. They don't want to be educated. They want to put some work out. There is A LOT of competition out there, and they don't care that I want an RTF. Also, clients will send you a word document that they want input on. Damage the formatting that they spent hours on, and you're in the dog box. The dog box is not a good place to be for profitability.
In the real world, you need to collaborate. Because most people use Word as their document format and Excel as their spreadsheet format, you use these or lose out.
The only way that this will change is if an office suite appears on the market that is able to both read and more importantly SAVE in these formats without losing formatting or information.
RMS really should put the GNU license on the weed he is smoking. Then everyone could freely examine, copy, and reidistribute it until their little hearts burst. Typical Stallman hypocracy. He gets mad someone would dare charge money for their software so he goes and makes his own versions to play with. The mantra of the FSF's mantra is "if there isn't a free version of what you need, make it and open the code". This would imply that noone ought ever bitch about having problems with anything ever because they shouldb e following the mantra of roll your own. Stallman can make all sorts of free stuff but is beleagured by files in .doc format? Shouldn't be he improving whatever software he has so it works with .doc files?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
that should be "computer WITHOUT MS Office installed"
;)
if only it were the other way
I say this as someone who uses AbiWord and Gnumeric regularly, is a big fan of their development, and hopes to see them take off as viable alternatives (although transparent import/export is going to be crucial to their success, if success is defined as practical useability in real-world other-people-inhabited environments. I agree with RMS on a lot - I think that freedom has an intrinsic value whether or not it creates better software - but that only should provide incentive for developing free alternatives, not provide a basis for pretending they are here yet when they really aren't.
We're hiring these days (temporarily for now), and today I had the pleasure of getting an email from the mailsweeper we use stating "an email from was bounced due to an unsafe attachment" or some such thing. I know our mailsweeper does rathe sophisticated analysis, so he might have a macro virus. Anyhow, his failure to attach the resume as an html document or plaintext file lost him a potential job.
God I love being PHB!
Stop the brainwash
I find that non-tech-savvy people prefer the copy/paste approach to exporting. Simply telling them to SelectAll/Copy/Paste into the eMail is usually better, I find.
An idealistic self indulgent fool, when the rest of the world is providing your living expenses with $$$$ grants etc.
Meanwhile in the real world....
Curmudgeon
simply 'strings WordDocument.doc | less'
man, this rms guy makes sense to me! My isp mailbox account used to fill up with huge rubbishy word files for trivial messages, and bump away really important mails. besides with slow unreliable connections keeps disconnecting aaargh!! can you geeks develop a software that automatically strips the word file into plain text files without all that junk ( i mean at the mail gateway or whatever it is called). The rtf trick also seems ok but really speaking plain text is better. I recieved a word resume with the f**'s photograph on it!! going to sign hoim up to some interesting sites the s.o.b. crashed my mailbox twice. ok sorry for the rant. maybe microsoft can make a smaller version of that blasted word doc only for email. GATES! are you there!!
Why is PDF considered non-proprietary?
Just to nitpick, I said a word processor shouldn't have a programming language, not an application.
For instance, I fully agree that Excel should have a scripting language, and so should Access. I have used VBA in those applications quite a bit. I just have not been able to justify its inclusion into Word.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product.
/me logs a feature request at bugs.openffice.org
Oddly enough, the WordPad program, although it does come bundled with the aforementioned OS'es will only allow you to edit a subset of the constructs possible in a full Word document (otherwise, Microsoft would never sell another copy of Word). So the original poster's question still stands. What if he had to edit a portion of the document that Word did not have the capability to edit.
And the only reason why Word is so commonplace is because it is so commonly pirated. But I guess a true Microsoft die hard thinks it's fine to turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into outlaws simply to edit a crappy document.
Yes, this is flame bait. No, I don't care.
That is all.
like dennis ritchie i havent found anything stallman writes to be worth gut room for over 10 years, they guy is so far out of reality he should be in his own dimension but financially he seems to do just fine from the 'free' software movement.
When did making money become a crime anyway?
Somebody sent me an image in email one day at work. It was a Dilbert cartoon about help desk hell. The problem: they inserted the image into a word file, with no text or formatting. They just used the .doc file as a wrapper for the image :P This was a PC tech too..
1) The really big argument isn't about the best way to send formatted messages. Most of the stuff I get this way doesn't NEED to be formatted in the first place. Just get people to type their messages without the formatting rubbish. It'll save them typing time and save us reading time.
.doc format because they think it does the job. The best way to get them to stop is to simply point out that their Word messages aren't working, and skip the extra baggage about GNU. Let them decide whether the best solution is to send XML or HTML or simply not bother with the complex formatting in the first place.
.doc for lots of stuff, because there often isn't a realistic alternative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for free software; I installed a Linux system for some friends and showed them how they could see those .doc files in StarOffice, and they were happy about that because they couldn't open those files in Word 97. I've seen all the postings saying "90% of XP files are readable in 97". 90% isn't all of them and that difference seems to be enough to annoy some people.
2) People will keep using
3) After that people are still going to use
Steve Bougerolle, steveb@pacific.net.hk, http://home.pacific.net.hk/~steveb
except that there are indeed cases that formatting is needed. However I guess the real issue is that regardless of your opinion... why don't you force that opinion on others. To hell with anyone else. To hell with choice. Make them PAY FOR THEIR SINS! Oh wait, that is RMS.
in fact I believe that to avoid hypocricy (assuming we get that annoying hypocritical part of forcing your 'open' view on others against their will) I say that just like everyone should be happy to use (and with RMS's band of merry brown shirts, be FORCED to use) the complexity of code for simple message transmittal. If we apply that (again in an un-hypocritical way) to the rest of our life, then we should take every bit of automation away, both automation from machines, and process automation through efficient processes. I think all these pathetic peasants/monkeys should be forced to micromanage every aspect of their cars, from voltage regulation, to timing, to fuel/air flow, to injection rates & amounts. Then they should be forced to get rid of computers in general and manually run their messages to the intended host. Planes are out of the question unless the travellers fly with their own set of provided wings. Then we need to get rid of all clocks (including sun dials) and people should never use maps or compasses, but should really know how to dead reacon. Hell, lets get rid of medicine too. People should make their own medicine and perform their own damn operations.
I could have sword that HTML was simply a simple, presentation only simplification of SGML, merely to provide a relatively powerful, yet easy and standardized format for exchanging documents. Wasn't it used in non HTTP formats at first as well? That might not be the case, but I thought it was designed as a document format, and it while the transport method at the time was the TCP/IP based net, it was not really dependant on it... but what do I know?
comon you fuckwads, read the fucking moderation guidelines. This is not a troll, it does not fit the troll guidelines anymore than a clinical report about the color smear of gonnocollal bacteria under a microscope is. If you don't like some part of it, respond to it. Otherwise, no matter WHAT you justify. I want you to read that carefully again... no matter WHAT you justify, the FACT (as in reality) is that you are a censoring bigot.
Or cuneiform tablets would be fine. More nonsense from Osama Bin Stallman - leader of radical Nixslam.
Many modifications are possible, of course. (P.S. The indentation is nicer in my file, but the lameness filter won't allow it. Sorry.)
Now, my message:
spare me the 'power to the people' or 'workers unite' I am a frig'n worker and I am tired of dolts like you that claim the bread that you neither baked, sowed or planted the weat, or tilled the fields. Get your ass off your high chair, get rid of your stupid 'tude and get to WORK!
I seem to remember a time long ago when wordperfect was the dominant software for word processing. Why doesn't the wordperfect corporation have a monopoly on word processing? Why aren't we sending each other wordperfect docs. You know why.
Wordperfect got pushed aside by word because the majority of people liked it better.
I don't care what word processing software is dominant, I like them all. I do, however, like standards, and so does the business community.
-ted
P.S. I wouldn't hire anyone that didn't have the resources to at least know someone that owns a machine with word.
RMS didn't say don't use MS Word (just not to attach Word documents in email, which can be rather annoying even if it's no problem to read them).
My home computer didn't come with a copy of MS Office when I bought it (I guess that's my fault somehow). So, when friends/family/etc. send me Word attachments I ask them to also send me a check for $479.99 so I can buy a copy of Office XP.
Really though, MS Office is expensive, even individual parts (i.e. MS Word) are quite pricey for someone to purchase for home use. I'm not inclined to drop a couple hundred $$$ just to read email attachments. When I make that point to the sender, they rarely volunteer the cash to enable me to read their attachments. They find doing a "save as text" or "save as html" or the like to be easier on the wallet.
What a bunch of touchingly honest people!
.DOC to the whole corp.
.DOC and find it was plain text with no formatting anyway?
If your goal is to have some effect, you'll go farther by not worrying about the exact truth and say whatever has the most punch.
RMS screed is *bad* because it runs on and on and on - the more words, the more dilute their effect. Pick ONE point.
AT HOME: "Sorry, I can't afford Word at home, it's $300, please 'save as text' or 'save as HTML', or just cut & paste the text.
AT WORK, MESSAGE FROM OUTSIDE: "Sorry, Corporate Policy prohibits opening Word files since we got hit by a virus from one." (plus the 'save as' stuff). This one's great, they'll never send another
AT WORK, MESSAGE INSIDE: (ok, here you're nailed. They KNOW you have Word, and that there's no corp. policy)
"Why are you attaching a file? Just put it on the shared disk, and save storage space".
(OK, that doesn't stop Word use, but that battle's lost at most corps anyway. It does stop the stupid practice of attaching at all, when there's a shared disk.)
PS: Don't you especially hate it when you open the
You do not have to own Word in order to view Word documents. MicroSoft offers a free viewer here.
I know this is not "free" in the 'liberated source' sense promoted by RMS, but it does solve the practical problem at no cost to the recipient of a Word file.
As all you network "professionals" doubtlessly already know none of the clients that you support use MS operating systems or the double-secret-proprietary Word format... And since most of you "professionals" only have access to one PC [in your step-dads basement and loaded on your only partition is some obscure pre-pre-beta LIN(Hey, I don't ever use MS, look at me I'm cool!!! )UX distribution]....
.PICT or .BMP files, DUH!
Welcome back to this side of the looking glass:
Now that we are all facing reality, lets admit that it is a good defacto standard to transfer and view doco, yes, we engineering professionals could all transfer doco using the LATEX standard, but then again, on the rare occasion we need to deal with the lesser species (about 2 dozen times a day) its nice to use a product we can assume the sheep have pre-installed by their friends at Gateway and Compaq.
... continuing to comment on the original editorial by RMS,:
A. The last operating system I paid money for was MacOS 7.5.1, 'cause you can't get the hardware with out it pre installed. I picked up a really old hard-drive at a yard sale and found that it had Word5 for Mac installed (Score). And it can easily open documents created by office 2000 Professional.
B1. Jumping straight to the first paragraph of Example 2. of the editorial, the melon-head recommends that we use PDF as one of the preferred formats. Does any one know how hard it is to steal that product from Adobe???
B2. Has the author ever paid for his own bandwidth? PDF? Why not type everything out on paper, scan it, and email it as
C. Really, how can you ensure that your SAMBA config is working right unless you have a "test client". I mean, your PHB is going to insist that all purchases come from an approved vendor I.E. Dell, so why not just get a kick-arse laptop and leave winderz on it... admit it, the power management is pretty good and you have to run a few apps, Snifferpro and VisualRoute.
Lets face it, either you are a pro and you have several machines at your disposal and can sacrifice one to the Gods of compatibility and install MS, or this is your first day computing and your only PC has Winderz as Michael Dell intended it when he put it in the box and sent it to your mom. Either way quit yer bellyaching and pretending that you "have trouble" reading a word document.
P.S. I'm not a complete Gates lover, I use BSD on all my important machines, but I try not to get used to the X-top, as it is hardly ever there when I need it, you know, when your telnet-ing in from a router that you have SSHed into from a web appliance that you have SecureCRTed into from a friends house or a rental workstation at the coffee shop.
corporations used word. corporations hire employees who used word. people who don't use word don't get hire by corporations who use word
must use word to pay the bills, send the kiddies
to college to learn to use word, so they can get hired so they can pay their kiddies bill
use word, it pays the bills
Because if Word is to become a de facto standard. In a long time to come, when it becomes very complicated, your old documents may not be able to read by any application, not even by Word itself. With html, even better xml, you are able to extract its contents and forget about the formatters. Unless, your old documents are not important. It is sad to see that people are still using secret format.
html or xml. Just to prevent Word becomes the de facto standard. In a long time to come, when Word becomes very complicated, your old documents may not be able to read by any application, not even by Word itself. With html, even better xml, you are able to extract its contents and forget about the formatters. Unless, your old documents are not important. It is sad to see that people are still using secret format.
This is actually a *much* better solution than many of the sniveling "plain text should be enough for everybody" posts I've seen here today.
I also have QuickView Plus installed (as part of the WordPerfect Suite), which supposedly lets you preview files in any of a hundred different formats. That program can't view documents from Word 97 or later either!
Isn't this about alternatives to paper documents? Is putting documents in a code that can only be fully decoded by the product of single vendor a smart thing to do? Well, maybe if you're that special vendor! Luckily, ascii text is too simple to keep secret, or we'd really be in trouble. But why is there no format for text and graphical electronic information exchange that is as universal as paper and typography? Because no one has yet developed it or established it as an open standard.
Well, we have HTML, but it is too limited, and we have PDF, but it is too complex to edit and is too much like paper. But there must be something that could be developed that would be JUST RIGHT! And when there is, it could be that it will catch on as quickly as HTML did for web documents. But only if there are good editing tools that will make it a pleasure to use. Notice how quickly all the favorite word processors had to acquire HTML save capability when that became the open standard for web documents!? It could happen again, if the open software world comes up with something so compelling that even M$ has to adopt it. Perhaps XML is that thing?
This is something the free/open software community is doing. An open XML standard is native for Star Office (but it isn't available for my Mac yet, dammit). And M$ seems to be taking notice that this is the wave of the future. Until this hope is realized, it seems we need mainly to have some "etiquette manuals" written to help educate business users that internet standards are applicable to all the email that travels on the internet.
ThosEM
-
Don't use MS-Word as a document exchange format (Goldberg, Jeffrey )
-
plaintext - In praise of practical e-mail hygiene (Vermeer, Martin )
n .html )
And here is mine. It is in Finnish:( http://www.goldmar k.org/netrants/no-word/ )
( http://www.netby.dk/Oest/Europa-Alle/vermeer/plai
"Miksi on typerää postittaa sähköpostin liitetiedostona MS Word -dokumentteja"
( http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~juhtolv/mswordmail.html )
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
Hi
I happened to run across your comment about Petspeed while looking at Borland C++ comments.
I wrote Petspeed back around 1980 with a guy called Rufus Potter in our back bedroom. Later we started OCSS to market it and some other stuff.
It was nice to see your comment and I would be interested in any Reminiscences you might have.
Anthony Wilkes
OK, a long time ago, before Word was even the "business standard", I actually used WordBasic to automatically generate some quarterly reports from a bunch of Excel files generated by the finance guys. It sucked the relevant numbers and graphs out of the spreadsheets and placed them in the document. What was a week long job every quarter boiled down to pushing a button and doing some touch-up work.
Was there better solutions? No doubt. Could I get at them? No. This was before Framemaker or other publishing packages had even been ported to Windows. Is this sort of integration one of the big reasons that MS Office rules the world? Definitely.
The point is having a progrmmable tool is much better than having a non-programmable tool. That's not to say that DOC should contain a macro payload.
Here's what I do: reply, but use my own, incompatible encoding. Hell, there's even a free viewer available. It comes out like this:
.........
eval {
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Since some people are fond of sending the most trivial e-mail in the
# form of bloated, proprietary attachments, I thought I'd do the
# same. It may not be readable by everybody, but it works on my
# system, and that's what counts, right? Anyway, the software you need
# is free, details at: http://www.perl.org
#
# Naturally, this attachment doesn't do anything to hurt your system,
# but you have to trust me on that, especially if you don't understand
# Perl. On the other hand, this may mean that you're a Windows user,
# so you are possibly used to trusting unknown programs, and possibly
# getting your system toasted. All I can say is that this works here,
# and, "Your mailage may vary".
$my_attachment = "001000000010000000
[ much snippage here ]
01100101011100110111010000001010";
$unmunged = unpack("A*", pack("B*", $my_attachment));
print $unmunged;
};
Those are not necessarily good reasons to SEND word documents. Better to send a Link rather than an attachment, especially when you are mailing it to many people.
Besides if you were really serious about formatting would you not be using PDF?
Mail clients do spellchecking, there is not reason why they should not do grammar checking, just at the moment they dont.
Silly you... the why 90% of the people like to use Word even though they have Notepad for free?
A "Printable HTML" format standard (XML based maybe) would be great. HTML is great but it doesn't know about paper sizes, per-page footnotes, etc.
Federico
unfinished: (adj.)
I think it's a little ironic that when I tried to load up the newsforge article using mozilla 0.9.7 (mac os9), the article didn't appear. talk about your incompatibilities... I had to load up internet explorer to read RMS's editorial.
I feel so violated now.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Most people don't like anything that takes them out of their rutine. They give a damn about openess, and even size.
We have a multi-national client (a BIG one) which wanted to do a survey in our country. This survey its done in a lot of diferent countries, and each country can present the results anyway they like (in fact they even encourage the presentation to be diferent so it can accomodate to each situation) but all of them have to send the results to their headquarters in France for revision.
Our idea was to automatically generate the presentations from the survey data (which was obvious from looking at the reports), creating a really nice looking, and easy to use, document in HTML. The guy who where conducting the survey liked it a lot, so we developed the app. After it was done and we sent it for revision, they told us that they had some trouble reading them (we specially designed it so it could be opened with both netscape > 4 and ie > 4.1, so maybe they used lynx, i dont know) and why it was that we couldnt send the report in powerpoint as every other country did.
We tried to explained them how much easier it was to generate HTML than to generate a PPT, how much plataform independent, etc. etc.. Their answer was that they didnt care, the rest of the countries sent it in PPT, so we should too.
The bottom line is that we had to cut and paste most of the document into PPT slides (because PowerPoint has a lot of trouble importing HTML with many tables). Oh, and i forgot to mention it, the PPT document is almost 5MB (because we have to save it as a previous PPT version).
Santiago
Reading between the lines do you know what that says? It says: Linux doesn't have even minimal functionality - it sucks. Really, that's what you're saying.
Plus it is wrong. strings(), AbiWord, KWord, and StarOffice all open Word documents. Just fiddle your mailcap if you need to get them opening automagically.
What you should instead is say what is wrong with Word. How about this ...
even with pre-electric typewriters
Well, it's not much, but I once made an (95%) automatic conversion from m3u playlists to cd covers for mp3 cds (the macro was lost in a system crash). That was fairly easy, since I could record the actions needed and then fix it to bee general.
for free, as in beer. Wordpad opens word documents. So EVERY user in the windows world can open them.