1) I get doc files from Boeing, USAF, US army, US Navy, all of my airline customers from around the world on a daily basis. I have no idea what version of word they use. All seem to open just fine in word 2000. All seem to open just fine in Word '97. 2. Hard to say. I have documents is WordStar, WordPerfect, AmiPro, and various page layout programs. I have to keep a copy of the programs around to read these older documents. I have made the effort to port some of them. Mostly, the "markup formatted" documents are just as hard to read as stuff with embedded magic codes. I would say that straight ASCII files are your best bet. Keep a paper file around if you want to preserve the formatting layout. Oddly enough, I doubt that most of the group can read any of my 20 year old documents on the media I have them on. (CPM OS floppies, spread across a mix of 8" formats, 5" hard sectored northstar and 1" punched paper tape) 3. Great idea. RTF did not exist 15 years ago. (See # 2) I have my doubts that it will be in use in 15 years. 4. Most books being printed today are submitted in word. The comment and markup features are used differently by each publisher. Some use notes, some use revision tracking, and most actually have a style guide they expect the author to follow. Word is a fact of life. Deal with it. You don't have to like it, but there it is. Mark Browne ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joel Schneider" <joel at joelschneider.net> To: <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 12:09 AM Subject: Re: [OT] Word was Re: LyX was Re: [TCLUG] Apple i Book ??? On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 07:58:48PM -0500, steve ulrich wrote: > all of the documents are placed into a reposity which uses an oracle > back end for handling the meta data associated with a given document > as well as providing really nice ACLs for controlling who can get > access to the document and such. it's really slick. Sounds great. Questions for you: 1. Which versions of Word does your system support? (e.g. Word XP, Word 2000, Word 97, Word 7, Word 6, Word for Windows 2.0, Word 5.5, ...) 2. What document processing program would you recommend for me if I absolutely need to be able to easily access all of the documents 10 or 15 years from now? 3. Why not store the documents in rich text format instead of using Word's proprietary .doc format? If my understanding is correct, at least RTF is a published (non-secret) file format. 4. What program would you recommend for me if my work is going to be published (professionally) as a book? Are books that were formatted using MS Word being published these days? -- Joel Schneider Jazz - jazz88fm.com joel at joelschneider.net ISEE - www.i-see.org _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list