Re: 1st lesson in Gaajan (wsd: Re: Weekly Vocab #1.1.3 (repost #1))

* Lars Finsen said on 2006-09-18 19:48:05 +0200
> taliesin the storyteller wrote:
> > * Lars Finsen
> > > Can you recommend a file format that's more transportable than rtf?
> >
> > Plain text, validating html (preferably xhtml 1), your own
> > xml-format, pdf, postscript, open formats like the ones used by
> > OpenOffice.
>
> Well, plain text is too plain. There isn't much layout, but there is
> some. For pdf I must buy a program that I don't think I need.
LaTeX is free and makes pdfs (well, pdflatex does). I wrote my Masters
thesis in LaTeX. Openoffice can, provided you have Java (which is free),
also save directly to pdf. Openoffice is free. If you have OSX they
should be easy enough to get hold of.

> I thought rtf was pretty open.
It's a text-version of an MSWord-document and won't always open between
versions of Word. But since it is a text-format it is easy to get a hold
of the plaintext by stripping all formatting.

> At least Mac and Windows users can share them. Who else cannot?
Unless Openoffice or special filters are used, Unix/Linux-users like
myself cannot.

> TextEdit on my Mac offers to save in rtf, html, Word and Word XML
> formats, in that order. Are any of these usable?
The first two are much better than the last two. If you use Word's html
I recommend you also get a hold of the little program tidy, which turns
bad html like Word makes into good html that you can display online with
pride. Heck, get tidy anyway, it'll clean up the html so it takes less
space and breaks fewer browsers regardless of source of the html.

http://tidy.sourceforge.net/#binaries

Both for OSX and classic.

> I am not deeply familiar with these concepts. Until very recently I
> have exclusively used WYSIWYG programs in editing my home pages. (And
> I guess it shows.)
I write my pages directly as xhtml. That is, I write them as broken html
then run tidy on them which fills in the missing stuff for me. But for a
real pro look, pdf can't be beat.


t.

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