Re: [Fsfe-uk] Health Service departments unable to read AbiWord attachments

[Chris Croughton]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 08:11:32PM +0000, Adam Bower wrote:

> I would ask why you chose Abiword as a format to send to them? Could the
> letter have not been sent as html or a .pdf? To be fair, I don't know
> which applications I have available on this machine to look at Abiword
> format files (well, I just discovered that Abiword is installed as part
> of Gnome, but I didn't actually know that until I checked).

Indeed, as far as I'm aware I don't have anything which reads Abiword
documents (I can't see anything on the Abiword site which says what
format they are in either).  I don't use Gnome or KDE so it's most
unlikely that I have it installed (I don't have it on either my Debian
woody system or on my Gentoo system).

> I'm not really certain of the issue you are trying to raise here, as
> technically they could be using a Free Software operating system but
> part of that may not include Abiword (for example).

Yup.  Does OpenOffice support it?  My copy doesn't say anything about
Abiword.

> So are you asking
> them to adopt Abiword? again, the other question to ask is do they only
> ask for letters of complaint to be delivered in a proprietary non-free
> format?

If so, is it one which is in fact supported by free software like OO?  A
lot of places say they want MSWord, for example, but I can give them the
OO exported version and it works fine.

> If they did that then it would be much more of a real position
> to be argued and one that I would want to take up with the local NHS
> trust my MP and possibly the members of the cabinet who are involved
> with IT and healthcare.

In general I send text, everyone can accept that.  It's not so pretty,
but if it's a matter of getting the data rather than making a good
impression that doesn't matter.

Chris C