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Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."
OpenOffice, would it be news here?
FYI, TFA only mentions 'Microsoft', no mention of 'Word'.
But who would ever think of using word to typeset a 2000 page document build from multiple sources. All my experiences with MS Word tell me that this is going to be a nightmare how ever you try to do it and what ever the content of the document is.
Why use a word processor, even Open Office or whatever, for ANYTHING? Text is much more reliable in plain text form. Formatting can be added in much better ways, independent of the content. Especially in legal cases, why thrust your textual data to such fragile, unreliable, locked in systems??
I think the important question here is not whether Word or OpenOffice was used.
The important question is:
Will this affect the deadline for appeal?
Not having adequate time to read the full verdict before deciding whether to appeal or not would in my eyes be a serious justice problem.
Submitting .docs in court? Surely legal documents should be submitted in an unalterable form such as - in days of yore, printouts - and nowadays PDFs. If you are looking for stupidity at its worst look no further than the legal system of any country. And for the very worst, anything related to (alleged) child abuse. The people working these beats are at the bottom of the legal and social services ladder. Bottom feeders, essentially. The word documents probably has virus infected macros too!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
turns out clippy was working for pedobear this whole time! Or maybe... come to think of it I never have actually seen clippy and pedobear in the same place at the same time....
Monstar L
I was surprised when I heard this was related to Microsoft Word. Don't most lawyers use Wordperfect?
Microsoft aids and abets child abuse. The controversy about whether or not they are evil is solved.
Putting this on Slashdot without giving more the info on this case (which would have very hard) is prone to disaster.
This has been the longest running case in Portuguese justice and has been full of stupid decision since day one. When this whole thing blew up (6 years ago or so) a few of the key people on the process were arrested and put in jail while the investigation was going. The theory was that there was the danger they would flee the country. Some were left there for the maximum time they can be arrested before a trial, while others after several months in jail were released and no charges were made against them (so maybe they shouldn't have been put in jail in the first place). From the ones that were put in jail and later released, none fled the country. So the first decision on this process was already a mess and a good start for the entire thing.
The trial was huge and went on for 6 years,the longest even in Portugal. There were 900 witnesses, 7 lawyers for the defendants and also the prosecutors. Since every one of these lawyers and the prosecutors has the right to talk to the witnesses this leads to about 7000 cross-interrogations. Whatever can be taken from 900 people and not summarized by 50 or 100 people (remember, this is a case about child-abuse, not country-wide rigging of elections or whatever) is still to be understood.
The victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all. They couldn't be precise on dates on when things happened, on places where things happened, on people present. It gets to the point of one supposed places where the abuses happened is described not by the exact address but by "an apartment with an odd door number on street [whatever]" (in Portugal buildings on one side of the street have odd numbers, on the other side even, so in practice they were just able to say we enter a building on this side of the street). One guy is accused of abusing a boy but the time span is described as "on the second trimester of year XXXX". I wonder how many of us could provide a solid alibi spanning 3 months... I'm not trying to defend no one here, but there were, but as far as we get to know, there was no clear solid evidence to anything. There aren't even phone calls between the abusers and the supposed ring leaders or anyone involved. People abuse other people for years and no phone call is ever made to set up any meetings and so on.
Now going to the decision itself, it was supposed to be read in June, later postponed to July due to lack of time to write it and then to September (there are "judicial holidays" in August in Portugal) as they still had no time to finish it. When the day of presenting it finally came, they attorneys were not given the decision by the judges, as it still had to be finalized. All sentences in Portugal are presented to the defendant when the paperwork is already on the Ministery of Justice system and can be accessed right away (to start preparing for appeals and so on). Not this one, because it was too big, with 2000 pages, and it had still to be finalized. The date of presenting the decision was Sep 3, the date of finally having the paper work was then said to be the Sep 8. That day came and things were postponed one day because there was a problem with the making of the PDF due to the size of the document. Next day it was postponed again to the 10th and it was a problem with the printer, generically described as a "computer problem", common nowadays when things go south. Friday by the middle of the afternoon the news came out everything will be finished by Monday. And yesterday there was this piece in the same newspaper as presented above:
Delay due to virus (Only in Portuguese, google translate should be as good as before)
So the reason has been changing with time and the most likely reason is the judges' inability to finish the thing on time (not wanting to go into the lack of skills vs lack of t
I accidentally read 'child abuse verdict held back by MS'.
Please don't hold back from trashing Word. I hate very few things in life, but Word - as trivial a piece of crap as it may be, it is raises my hackles really intensely and I'm enjoying this potential Word trash fest too much let it go just because of a few pesky facts. Keep it coming! Word sucks! Word is the devil. Word eats babies. Word stole your car. Word is destroying the planet. Come on, let's keep it going. Crap /. story, but we can still have fun with the comments!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Experts? This should be a five minute problem: Just export to PDF. Either the legal aids here are really, really computer illterate, or this is some sort of legal trick to stall for time.
I'm Portuguese and I'm really surprised they are using Microsoft tools (Word I guess) for this. The thing gets even more stupid when we think the trial is running since 2004 and when the entire country was expecting the final ruling, the process lagged a while more because of what it seems a Microsoft related glitch. More, (from another TFA http://dn.sapo.pt/inicio/portugal/interior.aspx?content_id=1660098) - they had to call some Microsoft "specialists" hired by the ministry of justice to help with the problem.
They should all be put in fetal position and slapped, then learn LaTeX or any other serious typesetting software.
Somebody probably sent one or more of the documents using the "Send to Mail Recipient for Review" feature. The feature seems to at least sometimes (perhaps depending on your e-mail client) set a custom property on the word file that makes annotations made by the Track Changes featire virtually impossible to delete. Thus exporting to PDF or something would have kept the printed annotations. So you'd have to turn off Track Changes and delete the Property manual.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
typesetting software is over kill for a document whose final form should be a pdf
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
So it's Microsoft's fault that people can't use the software?
So it's taken them 6 years to pick through a 2000 page document, 'cleaning out the computer related annotations'?
A single person could have had this cleaned up in a month or two with plenty of sanity to spare :/
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
This is exactly the reason I always advice students to write their thesis in Latex, rather than Microsoft Word. Latex does a better job of typesetting, and is what many people I talk to will end up having to use for journal submissions anyway, but the real kicker is that you don't want the whole thing to blow up and make your document unusable when you're almost done. I've never seen thin happen with Latex. I've seen it happen all too often with Microsoft Word.
Good luck to these unfortunate fellows in their attempts to get the document in a usable state again. I hope this also prompts a reconsideration of the technology choices. Perhaps Latex isn't the best choice for them, or perhaps it is, or perhaps Latex plus some front end will yield a good solution. Or perhaps Microsoft Word will turn out to be the best choice, after all. But there are several options to consider, and now seems a good time to start doing so.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Well you never entered a court or any other public service then, most of them still use XP, and knowing Ms Office is almost requisition to work there.
Looks like M$ astroturfers are out today, I feel bad for you.
We may never know the truth of this case this side of the afterlife, but after I die I'll ask St. Peter how much of this was "McMartin Preschool it-never-happened" bad police work and how much actual child abuse occurred.
I feel bad for the innocent child victims if there are any and I feel bad for those who were innocently accused, especially those who weren't cleared immediately and thereby had their lives ruined.
Unfortunately, in a case this big, there will likely either be innocent people convicted or guilty people acquitted. There will also be children who grow up wondering "are my memories real?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Typesetting software is precisely the appropriate level of software for a document whose final form should be pdf. Page Layout software however really is overkill for a document over one page indented to convey information primarily through the actual text.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Can you even *have* a 2k page Word document without tremendous compute resources?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
//me in best Seinfeld expression
I don't think so.
I've found that copying the body, headers, footers, and page layout from one Word document to a brand new one removes most or all of the stuff that "shouldn't" be in a published document.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
With plain text, I'm sure someone could manage to mix up DOS and unix line endings
That's why Python has "universal newlines": so that the code units representing newline on MS-DOS (0D 0A) and pre-2002 Mac OS (0D) get translated to UNIX newlines (0A) within the standard library. If you're willing to ignore pre-2002 Mac OS, you can just strip 0D from all files and end up with consistency among PC operating systems. The trouble starts when you bring in text files from VMS and some other operating systems not descended from UNIX or PC operating systems. Unlike text files on UNIX, MS-DOS, and classic Mac OS, where lines are delimited by a string of 1 or 2 constant code units, VMS text files are stored as a sequence of Pascal strings, where each line starts with a 2-byte integer representing the number of bytes (or was it characters?) in that line. (I learned all this after a discussion of why FTP has a text mode: VMS FTP servers are responsible for doing this conversion between Pascal strings in the file system and newline-delimited files on the wire.)
or character set encodings
In my experience, text files from UNIX, modern Windows, Mac OS X either UTF-8 or something based closely on the ISO 8859 character set that corresponds to the national language of the country where the court is located. A simple heuristic can easily tell those apart: UTF-8 never has no 80-BF code unit following a single-byte (00-7F) code unit and never has a code unit in C2-EF preceding anything but 80-BF.
But once you have a text file, the question becomes one of which markup language to use. The language's styling mechanism has to handle footnotes per page for one thing; at least in the United States, legal style doesn't use the easier-to-implement endnotes or parenthetical notes.
How is MS Word page layout software? It's a word processor. Just like OOo. LaTeX is useful if the final form is for printing and layout is absolutely critical (such as magazines, scientific documents with lots of formulas, newspapers, etc.). For legal documents, MS Word or OOo is sufficient.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
To clarify this point: Read TF PDF spec. The format was designed from the start to be alterable.
And to clarify oldmac31310's point, I'll give two reasons why PDF is not commonly seen as "alterable".
But as far as I know, the only unalterable computer document is a digitally signed one, and that won't become common until someone figures out home-user-friendly PKI.
To my knowledge, the "show codes" feature is [WordPerfect] only. No equivalent thing in Word except for
...saving your document in Office 2007 format, opening the document as a zipfile, and seeing the OOXML files.
No, a text editor is what should be used here. Typesetting software is for converting the document from text to PDF.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Pick any format-aware application that doesn't handle Microsoft's bloat and paste those 2000 pages. Problem solved!
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
In fact, it's what you very probably should use for scientific papers and such. It's not a catch-all though, and it has its own idiosyncracies and unfortunate design choices. Such as the high emphasis on rasterising, making intermediate files as well as the rest of the installation quite big. Or, say, the whole gn00 texinfo mess claiming it's better than manpages but manages to produce atrocious typesetting in spite of requiring the whole bloat of LaTeX behind it. manpages are still far superior in use despite lacking the fancy hypertext linking info offers -- if only because it doesn't claim to also own the interface and stuffs emacs bindings down your throat. That might be fine if you love emacs, but it's not a suitable default if you don't. I full well realise this is flamewar territory so I'll add that a captive interface that requires you to love vi keys is just as self-marginalising, with perhaps double the audience -- going on vi vs. emacs paintball action attendees. No option to not go to the manpage when no info page could be found and still forcing to use the captive interface I didn't want to use in the first place, just adds insult to injury. Using $PAGER instead doesn't have that problem, which makes it a better default choice. And the often given as default less is itself quite excellently powerful. Besides, manpages build on troff, which is itself an excellent typesetting package within the limits that made Donald Knuth write TeX when he needed to go beyond. But legal documents aren't quite as demanding as The Art Of Computing. I for one use troff for letters and such and it works quite well for that.
In fact, troff for the at&t legal (patents) department was the first killer app for Unix.
I agree, though I would have said to use a non-binary file format. Like html so you still have formatting. And if your editing software goes belly up and/or there's a formatting error, you can still pull the bugger up in a text editor.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
By the seems of things... Word is not sufficient.
In most situations, when you can't get rid of unwanted text that's sticky in word, do : CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+N, CTRL+V
Then keep on editing as usual.
(and I'm not even kidding)
It's not a glitch in MS Word. Word is doing what it's supposed to do. The people using Word messed up, from what I can tell from the translation.
Blaming Microsoft for this glitch is like blaming Google for the fact that the lawyers probably could have Googled for instructions for how to remove the extra info, but didn't.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
The real story here is why is a verdict 2000 pages long? Wouldn't a single page or two suffice?
It depends. Does OpenOffice have change tracking and commenting?
What happened here is they forgot to turn off Track Changes and, possibly, forgot to delete comments.
It's what happens when you use a word processor like a mechanical typewriter. The problem is not the tool, it's the organization that failed to train its people.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
They must be merging from multiple non-word documents or I don't see why this would work. I made a 500 page word doc one time in verison 2001 and all it did was tell me it was over the limit for spelling and grammar checking and would suspend the checking from there on. Also, scrolling sometimes stuck it at rendering the same page over and over. Other than that, it did actually function. What I'm thinking is they're trying to paste some HTML content or something and forgot to select the "keep text only" option after pasting it in.
Btw, they're burying the lead here. Why the hell does it need to be 2000 pages?!?! What could it possibly say?!?! How about just adding a reference to those other documents they're pasting in instead of adding them in their entirety.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
By the seems of things Word is overly sufficient. The bloatware has produced bloatwork that renders the result not even unusable, but counter-productive.
Does this come as a surprise to anyone who has used Word extensively???
.doc + 07-10 .docx), because I never know how badly the result will turn out...
.doc and .docx formats, so there might be CYA involved in not doing so...
To this day, I don't know why Microsoft hasn't added WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature to Word to help resolve this... I cringe whenever I have to merge documents from different sources, especially if they're from different versions (e.g. 97-03
In one example of a 10-page merged document, I deleted a group of bullets and the text moved 1/2 way to the right & the font changed, became bold, and was blue. But it wasn't a simple fix of moving the tab stops, changing the font, etc.--it wouldn't let me do some of those things. That document was so screwed up that I had to cut/paste everything into Notepad and spent 3 hours reformatting it from scratch.
I mean nobody is moving TO WordPerfect from Word, so Corel should want to get some $$$ from Microsoft to license the technology (e.g. due to copyrights, patents)... But then again, Microsoft might be scared to reveal how screwed up the formatting is within
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I'm Portuguese too and I am not surprised at all. A couple of years ago, I was accused of an IT related crime. When I went to be heard by the judge, the first thing she tells me is: "I know nothing of computers, for me they are just typewriters".
Then, under a pile of nerves, I had to explain to her what a server is, the meaning of uploading and downloading files, the difference between a website and a file hosted in a server, among several other basic stuff, dead worried that she would understand something wrong and recommend some jail time for me... Luckily, the charges were dropped later on.
Judges learning LaTeX? Not gonna happen any time soon, I'm afraid...
Select All.
Copy.
Open Notepad.
Paste.
Select All.
Copy.
Open a new Word doc.
Paste.
Save.
If you're going to merge documents from multiple sources, it helps not to do it in the stupidest possible way.
Start by reading each source and saving them all in the same format/version. This is as simple as Open... SaveAs...
If you have duelling styles, resolve them in a single .dot you'll use for the result and resolve the conflicts. That's what the Styles and Formatting dialog is for. That assumes that you have a clue about using styles.
You can't expect Word to make aesthetic decisions for you, or to resolve different, equally valid, formatting decisions made by different authors.
Hint: you don't "delete a bunch of bullets;" you give the text a different style.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Reading that, for some reason, is really horrifying to me. It just seems very, very wrong to have a judge who knows nothing about and indeed seems to have an aversion to computers presiding and ruling over an IT related case.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Then do it the old way!
Copy & Paste people! Make a new TXT document, then open each word doc, select all, copy, then paste into the new one in the proper order! Formatting is now removed. Either stick with that, select all and copy the TXT file and paste it in a fresh Word DOC.
Poof now you magically have a single document that has ALL the other documents merged into it.
Uh.. yes, that's what LaTeX is. You edit in any text editor of your choosing, and then run the marked-up, but otherwise completely bog-standard text file through the typesetting engine to produce something you can print, whether that's a PDF, postscript, DVI, or whatever. You can even output HTML if you need to.
Word is the thing that's overkill: it's page layout software. There are too many knobs for general text, and although it includes tools that could make it nearly as useful as text editor + typesetter (e.g. styles) they go unused. It's a hybrid, whose lowest common usage forces people into the least efficient scenario.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But with MS Word if you actually try to LAY OUT something with embedded images, columns, etc, it will drive you nuts. How many times have you added one word to a paragraph on a page with a picture or tried to nudge a picture down a bit and everything just snaps and you suddenly find said picture 3 pages down?
Word is TEXT ONLY, for desktop publishing or layouts you need something like scribus or the closed source equivalent. Of course, for text it's the defacto standard, I feel sorry for Word Perfect and Quattro Pro, I was actually TRAINED on WP and Quattro in college (engineering school), and I think they are (or were at the time) superior.
The word processing zealots (English teachers in high school) were adamant we learned Word Perfect for dos, and all of the keyboard shortcuts. Is WP still being developed?
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
The trial took 6 years. This glitch is only taking a few days, "should" be sorted out by Monday. BTW, they're appealing the decision, so possibly they'll get way with no time in prison. On the other hand, the sentences are like 6/7 years for 3/4 counts of child abuse (that equates to less than 2 years per count). Since our penal code has been "conveniently" changed by the socialists in government (which, coincidently, had a former big-shot minister implicated in the case), if convicted they are only required to serve 1/4 of the sentence (by then, they can ask the prison director to spend the rest at home). That's how we handle pedophiles in Portugal...
Sure. For an average word document, 1k of those pages would be just vertical space. And as everyone knows, professional MS Word users can make blank pages with only about 21 newlines.
The fact that word is a crappy page layout engine, and not really suited to the task does not change the fact that it is, primarily, a page layout engine.
Notepad is text only. Wordpad can be text only. Word can export to text, but really isn't "text only" in any sense of the word. Even the text export will be wonky, depending on how it decides to interpret the layout decisions you made.
side note: If wordperfect for dos is what you're looking for, I'd recommend one of the incarnations of Vim or Emacs that works on your system. (but I'm a vim zealot, so bleh on the emacs.)
Anyway, the point is that Word is a page layout program, especially when compared to "text editor + [La]TeX." but it's a terrible at page layout. It's both overkill and insufficient to most of the tasks it's allegedly suited for.*
*there is one arena where it's "good enough." And that's for short papers that need some page-layout, but are short enough that they don't need consistent structure. i.e. eigth-grade term papers. Unfortunately, eighth grade seems to be where people cement their idea of what a good tool for producing stuff with words is.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Latex Bitches.
I recognize that styles can be customized by different users. However, when it comes to college students, few people change the base styles that come with Word. The example I was citing was getting files from 3 different people, none of whom use Word for anything beyond basic word processing, and attempting to cut/paste parts into into a file to submit to a teacher as a group paper. Margins, tab stops, bulleting, source OS (Windows vs. Mac), etc. may all be different, but that wouldn't cause conflicts in a well designed product (of which, Word is not).
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Depends on the creator of the PDF, though. I wanted to code a quick and dirty web app for customizing business cards, so I remembered that it was just like you said, and all I had to do is open up the InDesign layouts, replace the name with $name$, the address with $address$ and so on and export a PDF X/3 for printing. I'd then have the user input the values and just search and replace the variable names with the values entered.
Only that the resulting PDF contained none of my field names. It was a PDF which could be rendered just fine, but when you opened it up in a text editor, it was basically a blob.
So I thought that was because I used X/3, maybe it's compressed for that. I then tried every other standard setting it had, to no success. I gave up and changed to using INX (Indesign Exchange Format) which at least contained the text blocks in plain text, but it showed me that in practice, PDF's aren't plain text any more, at least if you use the "professional" from the fucking INVENTORS of the format. It's blobs all the way down.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Good luck laying out a magazine or newspaper with laTeX. It can be done, but it's the equivalent of hand-cutting a screw-thread with a file. Word would be far better, because MS have forgotten that it's supposed to be a word processor and have bolted on loads of DTP features, but a dedicated DTP package such as Scribus would be far better.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Scribus ftw. (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211489/en-us
I don't know why a (probably hypothetical) question is modded insightful - flamebait may be more appropriate.
Anyway (and I know I'm feeding a troll, especialy given your other comments, but...) the answer is yes. Yes, you can. We have MS Word documents that are several thousand pages in length, including formulas, maps, charts, etc. No problem.
P.S. I can't let this go, because in a former life I was involved in DTP - your repeated insistence further up about Word being page layout software and not word processing software is just foolish. Either you're deliberately trying to pick an argument or you have no clue about what packages like PageMaker (which I was using when it was Aldus PageMaker) really do. Grow up.
...in other news, "Dog bites man."
(Film at 11.)
pdf=="for printing"
This is why pdf's are always so specific about page layout etc. They are intended to reflect the actual appearance of a printed document, not its text or content. What you're saying is that the judge should move to .rtf or .txt, or use .odt or (shudder) .doc as the final output form that they make public. PDF is probably used instead because its slightly less evil than .doc and the judge has never heard of the others (yes, including .txt!).
$ make available
Legal documents use UPPERCASE in place of BOLD quite often. They used to be TYPED without even the ability to format the type... longer than we've had computers with formatting...
A simple text editor is all they require... actually, there surely must be some word processor without document features that has tools to aid in writing legal documents... and one might be created... but everybody thinks WORD is what should be used.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
For once this is not MS's fault. They can't control how the software is used (although they do try it with their "interesting" default settings), because in the end it is the end user who is responsible for whatever was written.
I do understand and believe that the infamous MS Word default settings might have contributed to this issue, but yet still - the resulting document still belongs to end user's responsibility.
Sure, if you don't mind waiting 10 minutes for it to load on commodity hardware
Wow, WTF is wrong with the mods? I'm 0 troll, you are 1 flamebait :/
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Actually, the Styles and Formatting dialog is where you deal with these issues. Mostly using "Select n Instances" to resolve style conflicts. Margins, tab stops, bulleting, are all styled and can easily be restyled.
It matters not that your sources didn't define any new styles by name. If they used any formatting, it got captured as a style that can easily be replaced with whatever you choose as a standard.
That assumes you have a clue about using styles, and, that you've defined a standard set of styles. Next time, give them a .dot and tell them what the standards are before they start work.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.