Re: waking up

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano) on Sun, 20 Jul 2003
16:59:29 -0400


> As I understood it, the question was ...
> what to attach that will allow a Xy-formatted document
> to be reconstituted at the receiving end ASSUMING THAT the recipient
> DOES NOT HAVE XyWrite.

Thank you! She never said "doesn't have XyWrite", but that seemed implicit to
me too. In my experience, the tacit assumption of everyone I communicate with
is that documents are in M$Word. People don't even ask what WP you're using --
it's just a given (same as Windows is a given). I'm dubious about RTF as a
general solution. Maybe 2 or 2½ of my correspondents know what RTF is, or know
how to handle RTF if they receive it -- the rest are complete ignoramuses
(thanks, Bill). The argument for RTF is cross-WP portability (e.g. to WordPerf
in the legal world); but you gotta weigh that against the raft of users who
will be totally lost when they get an RTF. If I had to select one format, for
the widest acceptability and the least befuddlement, I'd pick M$Word. Which
means everybody has to go to a binary NG and grab CD imagez of -- whoops! did
I say that? -- everybody has to shell out hundreds of dollars for a WP they
don't intend to use.

As for getting the document into M$Word format, the Hungarian filters are good
enough usually, and otherwise the NBWin filter does a superior job (here you
shell out hundreds of dollars for a WP you would _like_ to use, but can't get
to work right).

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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