Document formats

[cloverm]

Let's say I type up a document in OpenOffice, then I want to email it to a bunch of people that could be using Windows, Linux, MAC or whatever and any variety of word processor. What format should I save my document in that will be most likely compatible with all these OSs and word processors. I'm thinking about Rich text, but not sure.

[Tyr_7BE]

Rich text would be the best way to go. From my experience, the supposed "Office 97/2000/XP" format is sketchy at best. Yeah they'll get the idea of what the document's about, but there's no way in hell they'll be able to edit it. I made the mistake of typing a HUGE report once and saving it as a .doc from OOo. Spent some time fixing that booboo...the computers at school running Office XP could read it, but any sort of change whatsoever and it sent the entire document off-kilter. RTF is definitely recommended. As of Office 2003, Office users will be able to read XML (if not write it), which will DEFINITELY be cool .

Hyper Text Markup Language? PDF?

[cloverm]

[quote author=socomm link=board=2;threadid=6518;start=#61358 date=1046897061]
Hyper Text Markup Language? PDF?
[/quote]

HTML might be a good one. PDF? It's read-only and you must have some reader (Acrobat?) installed. Also, how would you go about creating it on Linux?

Easiest way is a Office program like OpenOffice or AbiWord. Go to File->Print than choose the option 'Print to File' a box should appear go to the bottom pull down menu choose 'PDF' and rename it to xxx.pdf press save and voila you have a PDF file. You might also want to try ascii2pdf, this utility is great if you only want to convert simple text to pdf. Also if you would like to unencode the pdf file or dump it to html you can try PdfToHtml, I found this utlity great for dumping pdf books to html and than reading them from the command line. Also check out the demo pretty nice

[Schotty]

[quote author=socomm link=board=2;threadid=6518;start=0#61358 date=1046897061]
Hyper Text Markup Language? PDF?
[/quote]

Yeah, those are the only standards that everyone with a computer newer than a 386 is sure to have.

[BigFatJoe]

[quote author=Schotty link=board=2;threadid=6518;start=0#61376 date=1046909588]
Yeah, those are the only standards that everyone with a computer newer than a 386 is sure to have.
[/quote]

In that case, use .txt and you're set for the 386's as well...

pdflatex, latex (ie. dvi or ps), latex2html all sound good.

[Mor_gath]

postscript ?