brunovecchi
September 19th, 2008, 08:50 PM
I am in the process of writing a scientific article and a conference poster in collaboration with Windows users, and am really very bothered by the lack of knowledge of even the existence of open formats for each type of documents.
The less tech-savvy people don't even realize that non .doc documents can be opened within their word processor of choice (guess which), and they seldom care if they send you information in a proprietary format that forces you to
become a pirate
pay about 60% of your salary for a license
be lucky enough that any of the reverse-engineered .doc converters work without corrupting the information
So I made the decision that, as of now, I'll only share the information that I create using open formats (won't be "kind enough to send it in 'doc'"). And when sent files with closed formats, I'll try to educate the person by linking to www.openformats.org (http://www.openformats.org) and telling them that, even If I did get to open their document, it was not without major cursing to most of the individuals upstream their genealogy tree, specially their mother.
I'd like to hear your take on this. Personally, I encourage you to both use open formats exclusively, and promote its use to others.
I think we have a lot of teaching to do.
Here's a snippet from http://www.openformats.org/en5
Which proprietary formats should be avoided
Proprietary formats are not exchange formats. Most of the data that you stored in proprietary formats and that are meant for diffusion or electronic publication can be easily converted to the corresponding open formats.
Main proprietary formats to be avoided include the following:
* MS Word formatted text documents (DOC) <-- Absolute evil
* MS Excel tables and databases (XLS, XLW)
* MS Power-Point slide shows (PPS, PPT)
* Bitmap images (BMP, TIFF see below)
* Vectorial images (WMF)
* MP3 Audio files
* Windows Media Audio (WMA)
The less tech-savvy people don't even realize that non .doc documents can be opened within their word processor of choice (guess which), and they seldom care if they send you information in a proprietary format that forces you to
become a pirate
pay about 60% of your salary for a license
be lucky enough that any of the reverse-engineered .doc converters work without corrupting the information
So I made the decision that, as of now, I'll only share the information that I create using open formats (won't be "kind enough to send it in 'doc'"). And when sent files with closed formats, I'll try to educate the person by linking to www.openformats.org (http://www.openformats.org) and telling them that, even If I did get to open their document, it was not without major cursing to most of the individuals upstream their genealogy tree, specially their mother.
I'd like to hear your take on this. Personally, I encourage you to both use open formats exclusively, and promote its use to others.
I think we have a lot of teaching to do.
Here's a snippet from http://www.openformats.org/en5
Which proprietary formats should be avoided
Proprietary formats are not exchange formats. Most of the data that you stored in proprietary formats and that are meant for diffusion or electronic publication can be easily converted to the corresponding open formats.
Main proprietary formats to be avoided include the following:
* MS Word formatted text documents (DOC) <-- Absolute evil
* MS Excel tables and databases (XLS, XLW)
* MS Power-Point slide shows (PPS, PPT)
* Bitmap images (BMP, TIFF see below)
* Vectorial images (WMF)
* MP3 Audio files
* Windows Media Audio (WMA)