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Re: Reference Manual updates

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Fri Dec 3 22:04:30 1999 )

Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 08:59:53 -0500
From: Fabien Ninoles <fabien@Nightbird.TZoNE.ORG>
To: coldstuff@cold.org
Mail-Followup-To: coldstuff@cold.org
In-Reply-To: <199912011921.LAA20148@taller.eng.sun.com>; from Jeffrey.Kesselman@eng.sun.com on Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 11:21:48AM -0800
Reply-To: coldstuff@cold.org

On Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 11:21:48AM -0800, Jeff Kesselman wrote:
> 
> >
> >Of course keeping it in a word format is also an option, just not on my
> >list ;)
> >
> 
> I THINK this falls into "if your gonna sue volunteers ya gotta let em use the 
> tools they're comofrtable with". The vast majority of the non-geek world 9and i 
> thin keven the good majoprity of the geek world) have moved beyond text editor 
> and lay out macros And don't really want to return.

Why? I go from Word to LaTeX to SGML to XML. Conversion was quiet easy since
I don't have to care about the presentation of my documents in the last ones.
BTW, WordPerfect is able to read/write SGML and an open format that can be
write in Words too is HTML. However, Words can do a real mess of HTML
documents. You should use HotMetal instead, and write XML (which can be easy
converted to anything).

> 
> Best solution would be to find a reasonable intermiediary from that word can 
> write and that can be translated automaticly to what you want, Brandon.
> (As a side note, you CAN read PDF, if you can run Java. There is a JAVA PDF 
> viewer available form Adobe.)

You can read it but you can't edit it. So, if Brandon want to make some update,
it has to buy Words. When MS will get Words run on BSD? on Java at least
[not the MS extended one, it would be silly to run MS Words for Java on
Windows].

> 
> Word writes a LOT of formats. One I knwo f thats suppsoed top be resonably 
> portable is RTF...
> 

Can you translate words doc to cml/ctext? I think not. Same thing for RTF.
You lost a lot of information in both RTF and Words format. HTML is a better
format if you don't use Words to write and follow a strict convention.

> 
> Jeff Kesselman
> Member of Technical Staff IV
> JDK Performance/RAS Team
> SUN Microsystems
> 


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