Slashdot Mirror
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?
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 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.
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?
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??
How can I spend hours obsessing over fonts, colors and trying to get my pie charts and org graphs to display nicely with such a thing?
Pardon me, I need to send an email to the entire organization because someone left a file open on their machine that I need to work on. What an idiot!
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
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.
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
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.
My vote is that all official documents must be typed in vi(m), or at worst emacs. Even if somebody did manage to use DOS line endings, a few simple keypresses would fix it.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
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.
Yes, it's Microsoft's fault that you have to spend 3 or more years in high school learning how to produce a simple document, and another two years or more in college learning how to make more complex documents. Who else would you blame?
Of course I think colleges everywhere should create a MS Word PHD, for those poor users that after 10 years using a computer don't know that caps lock is the cause of their text being all in uppercase.
Can you even *have* a 2k page Word document without tremendous compute resources?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
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)
Thanks for that tip. Only slightly less painful than using a hex editor. Or poking your eyes out.
Office automation at it's finest.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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?
"The people using Word messed up..."
Yes. By using MS Word in the first place. I don't know if they were ignorant, naive, clueless or stupid or some combination of all of them but I cannot fathom what made them think that using Word for a 2000 page document was a good idea. I made the mistake of using it for a paper a fraction of the size rather than learn latex. I'd swear it has a random formatting generator built in.
...in other news, "Dog bites man."
(Film at 11.)