Re: SEUL: common file formats

[Thomas Dietel <tdietel@fpddux.usc.es>]

On Thu, 29 May 1997, Alexandru Dan Corlan wrote:

> > The Rich Text Format (RTF) was designed by Microsft and is supported
> > by most of their word processing products, as well as word processors
> > from other companies on other platforms. The format, I believe, is
> > an open standard whose specification can be obtained at:
> 
> Nevertheless, what do you think about promoting HTML as a transfer
> format? M$ _has_ to support it, it is ISO standard (as it is an SGML)
> and there are many html2x and x2html convertors for most of the
> systems around. In my experience, converting from a `detailed layout'
> program such as LaTeX, PageMaker, MSWORD and so on to another one
> always leads to pain. If it always goes via html the user will know
> in advance to what level of graphical detail things get converted.

IMHO we should not try to establish new standards for data exchange, e.g. 
HTML or RTF, but open a convenient way to use de-facto-standars (Winword...)
in our Linux distribution.  Although we can assume that our "target user"
will know how to use text converters, many people with whom he wants to
exchange data will not know how to generate a HTML file from their Word
document, and so our target user will have to cope with this "standard".  

As far as text exchange is concerned our target user could prefer a word
processer like StarOffice, Applixware... or TeX/LaTeX for his work. So 
we have to  provide tools to convert the DOS/Win/Mac-formats to the 
word processer or LaTeX format. 

If we decide to provide a word processor like StarOffice with our 
"distribution" we will hopefully get a convertor for most PC formats with 
it, in case of LaTeX a word2(la)tex converter would be nice.

Thomas
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