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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."
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.
I was surprised when I heard this was related to Microsoft Word. Don't most lawyers use Wordperfect?
No, they use IBM GML, aka "Bookmaster" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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
Correct. If they'd been using OpenOffice.org, they'd have turned off the change tracking feature in disgust after the third time the computer paused for several seconds while making a minor edit and gone back to making a secretary manually merge the documents.
I've never used this feature in MS Office, so I don't know if it's any better, but it's an absolute disaster in OO.o. So bad, in fact, that the last project I was on, they decided to move to LaTeX for the next version because change management is easier and they decided the time spent learning LaTeX would be less than the time wasted with OO.o.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
He's right about that. Legal offices are the last holdouts on Word Perfect. The formatting is quite precise and predictable. Legal office workers are quite adept at editing with WP's "show codes" mode to ensure than everything is formatted exactly and correctly. While I believe it is true that MS Word also offers a feature like this, I'm not sure that people actually use it... or know how to for that matter.
To clarify this point: Read TF PDF spec. The format was designed from the start to be alterable. It starts with a list of objects. The end of the file contains a linked list of dictionaries of objects, giving their locations in the file. You can edit a PDF, preserving all previous versions, simply by appending some new objects, a new dictionary that references these with a higher version number, and links back to the previous dictionary. The nice thing about this design is that you can update a PDF without overwriting anything, just by appending. You can then compact the PDF in a separate step, removing unreferenced objects and writing a single dictionary.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What version were you using, and was it with Word or ODF documents?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
PDF is alterable with notepad++, to clarify TheRaven64's point. Its not terribly difficult if you want to alter straight up text.
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 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)
The real story here is why is a verdict 2000 pages long? Wouldn't a single page or two suffice?
A standard verdict form is lengthy because each count of an indictment is addressed separately. If there are multiple counts, and multiple defendants, each defendant's counts will be listed and verdict rendered. This is standard practice, and ensures that the outcome of each charge is clear, point by point.
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.
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.
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?