Re: [Fsfe-uk] Health Service departments unable to read AbiWord attachments

[Chris Croughton]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 10:42:05PM +0000, Matt Lee wrote:

> >If so, is it one which is in fact supported by free software like OO?
> >A lot of places say they want MSWord, for example, but I can give
> >them the OO exported version and it works fine.
> 
> That's what I'd do, or even RTF or PDF. PDF is always good.

I don't have a PDF generator handy, plus it's difficult to copy & paste
from PDF (and with a CV that's what they want to do).  I often attach
several versions (plain text, MSWord and RTF, or all three zipped) just
to be sure.  Why give them the opportunity to say "we can't accept
that"?

> So, that's XML, but it's not even a standard like the OASIS file  
> formats that OO.o uses.

"It's XML, Jim, but not as we know it!"

Yet Another Proprietary Format.  Expecting someone to be able to read
some non-standard format is silly, and expecting them to install another
word processor to be able to read it is equally so (even if it is Free
Software, the time to install it and to learn to use it is /not/ free,
it costs them money).

If anyone sends me Abiword documents, I'll bounce them as well (and
possibly attach a core file -- that's an open format, they can accept
that!).  I don't mind accepting MSWord documents that OO.o can read, the
sender probably doesn't have anything better (and again, expecting them
to retrain or to install yet another WP is unreasonable).  I'll accept
virtually anything from a Windows user, as long as I can make sense of
it (strings(1) is my friend!), but I expect FLOSS users and software
writers to at least adhere to open standards when communicating.

How can we try to spead the word about open standards, let alone free
software, if the software we're promoting doesn't use them?

Chris C