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

[Chris Croughton]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 02:51:46PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

> Chris C wrote:
> > [...] I don't mind accepting MSWord documents that OO.o can read, the
> > sender probably doesn't have anything better [...]
> 
> Are there versions of MSWord which can output neither RTF nor HTML?

There are certainly some which can't output /readable/ HTML.  I've had a
number of problems with RTF getting the documents to look reasonable, as
well, it's a lossy format.

> More than 90% of the time, sending me Word gets a request to
> resend as something smaller and more reliable, especially if
> you are a council, as they're told not to do that (data escape!).

Are they?  That's useful.  In general, I request that people don't send
me Word either, since I operate in text-only mode most of the time (OOo
is a resource hog, and a fair bit of the time I'm working remotely over
a limited bandwidth line).  I will accept Word if that's what the person
has and they need the formatting accurate.

(In fact, if the person is trying to cooperate I'll do a lot to try to
accomodate them, including recently attempting to reverse engineer the
frmat and write an extraction program.  But if they just send me some
odd format with no explanation I'm not likely to try as hard...)

> Mind you, some councils went a bit free with their "Freedom of
> Information" changes, publishing all requester contact data,
> which wasn't quite what they were told to do either.

<g>  All information must be free, eh?

Chris C