Re: English versus German

On Jul 7, 9:57 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 7, 1:19 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Jul 6, 1:54 am, "Brian M. Scott"<b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 20:09:09 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote in
<news:b0136843-d5ae-4b0d-87b2-1f900771b768@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

On Jul 5, 5:32 pm, Adam Funk<a24...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
On 2009-07-05, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

[...]

Then you have to tell the person who sent you the .doc
document that you are out of step with most of the
world and are unable to read documents in .doc format,
please resave it in .rtf.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
I don't know who Richard M. Stallman may be, but since he
lies about Word in his first paragraph, I didn't bother
reading the rest of it.

He does not.  Word attachments *are* annoying, and they *do*
impede people from switching to free software.  They are
tolerable *only* because OO.o deals with them reasonably
well.

He falsely claimed that Word documents are not forward- and backward-
compatible and you "have to" upgrade every couple of years to be able
to use old or new files.

Those are true. MS just got forbidden from doing it from 97 to 2003.

I don't know what this means -- who forbade whom to do what?

Some US monopoly-abuser watchdog agency made it very difficult for MS
to change file formats with every release as they used to. If memory
serves, they weren't exactly forbidden from doing that, but if they
did try it there would be a serious reassessment of their abusive
practices as a monopolist.

It's not a coincidence either that MS went on developing Office for
Mac and isn't at all interested in eliminating Apple - Apple is where
MS can point to whenever someone says that there's no alternative to
MS.

The new format introduced in Word2007 (.docx) uses much less disk
space than the old (.doc) format,

It doesn't use neither more not less space, it's just different. The

Of course it does (use less disk space). I resaved a number of files
from .doc to .docx and they occupy less than half the disk space.

Maybe your .doc files were carrying old data around. Unless you
uncheck 'allow fast saves' or whatever, Word doesn't really save a
file anew when told to, but merely appends some data to the existing
one. Saving in a different format, or using 'Save As', does create a
file with only the current contents.

.doc formats were binary, .docx is zipped plain text plus whatever
resources are included in the file. Possibly the compression in .docx
can make it slightly smaller, but only in what regards the text itself -
whereas what really makes those files large are the resources (pictures,
etc), which usually aren't very much compressible.

I'll worry about that if I ever put graphics (what is "etc."?) in a
file.

Sound, etc. Anything that is not simply 'text'.

but Word2007 can with no problem
save in the old format (it can even be set as the default format), and
users of the earlier versions can easily download a free
"Compatibility Pack" that enables them to read .docx files and
includes all the new fonts.

It doesn't work flawlessly, it's only available for Word 2003 and it's slow.

The .docx format is simply MS introducing a completely new format just
so that competitors are left out in the cold again, now that .doc
import/export was beginning to be usable in non-MS products. As I said,
they were forbidden from doing that for a while (what with the DoJ
litigation), but took this opportunity from the Industry's global shift
to xml-based file formats (the plain text in .docx is xml).

Theoretically, .docx is less of an evil than .doc, but in practice it's
worse.-

No evidence of that.

- .doc is an incomprehensible dump of Word's internal state which,
however, any word processor can read and write reasonably these days

- .docx is a passable structured representation of a document, with
recoverable text and resources, which, however, can only be read and
written by Word, because it's official specification is so confusing,
incomplete and patent-ridden that no one has yet spent the effort
required to create a usable import / export filter.

I certainly concur with you in what regards Tex's defaults - and do I
hate it when people just shrug and keep on using them -, but I
positively loathe Word and the way it doesn't do anything right. And
I'm certain *you* could produce better *and faster* output with Tex
than you do with Word if you had spent the same amount of time with
both. Unlike Word, Tex will always obey you if you know what you want.
.

Relevant Pages

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