And this is (Egypt) supposed to be the most modern - in ways the leader - of all Arab countries. The government there is so frail that an action movie actually poses a threat to it's survival...
Well the doc format is available for developers and infact there are word processor for non-windows platforms that can open.doc files (true, not all doc files but regular documents).
PDF and.doc are the de-facto standard today just like PS used to be a few years ago, the problem is that today we got XML and other web standards designed specifically for this sort of thing - generic content.
I say if you save a document file these days ( without OLE in it, etc) to anything other than HTML/XML you're doing disservice to the whole standardization movement thing that's going on. True, PDF and doc readers are ubiquitous, but not more than HTML browsers!
What good is it to convert one proprietary format to another? I think open source word processors should focus on standard formats such as XML (which infact MS does, albeit not very portably). PDF is proprietary and is not editable unless you pay Adobe. What's so good about PDF anyway? Seriously, the font smoothing is now a feature of Windows XP so I don't see any advantage PDF has on.doc at the reader level. Besides, XML as it is now with HTML rendering is good enough for 99% of the documents, I'm sure. I'd like to see more HTML, MathML, XML improvments in word processors rather proprietary format war. The format is nothing, when you think about it. How hard is it to serialize a document? It's not. The big deal is in the editors and that's where the competition should take place.
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And this is (Egypt) supposed to be the most modern - in ways the leader - of all Arab countries. The government there is so frail that an action movie actually poses a threat to it's survival...
Well the doc format is available for developers and infact there are word processor for non-windows platforms that can open .doc files (true, not all doc files but regular documents).
PDF and .doc are the de-facto standard today just like PS used to be a few years ago, the problem is that today we got XML and other web standards designed specifically for this sort of thing - generic content.
I say if you save a document file these days ( without OLE in it, etc) to anything other than HTML/XML you're doing disservice to the whole standardization movement thing that's going on. True, PDF and doc readers are ubiquitous, but not more than HTML browsers!
What good is it to convert one proprietary format to another? I think open source word processors should focus on standard formats such as XML (which infact MS does, albeit not very portably). PDF is proprietary and is not editable unless you pay Adobe. .doc at the reader level. Besides, XML as it is now with HTML rendering is good enough for 99% of the documents, I'm sure. I'd like to see more HTML, MathML, XML improvments in word processors rather proprietary format war. The format is nothing, when you think about it. How hard is it to serialize a document? It's not. The big deal is in the editors and that's where the competition should take place.
What's so good about PDF anyway? Seriously, the font smoothing is now a feature of Windows XP so I don't see any advantage PDF has on