Re: [Fsfe-uk] Acceptable formats

[Samuel Liddicott]

John Seago wrote:

The most commonly accepted formats are .doc and.rtf. Your solution of
plaintext obviously works well too. 
    

Others may wish to correct me, (please do), but it would seem that the 
formats with which government offices can cope are restricted to those 
with which Microsoft software can cope.

  

You observation is correct but incomplete.

It is also restricted to those with which "good" non-microsoft software can cope.

There any many other text document formats that MS software can cope with, so too can other companies software.

I think the full observation would include "common subset" somewhere it it, and "well known", perhaps "widely supported".

.doc is definitely a "de-facto standard", rtf is a published standard.

It is fair for them to be able to accept formats that most "good" software can produce, for 2 reasons:
1) most people can produce it with their software
2) they themselves can read it with their own software

The speaker wants to be heard, the writer wants to be read, the listener wants to understand. In a world of dialects something in common must be found, naturally such commonalities (ugh) exist in whatever package they use. Naturally such commonalities are found more in common software.

Sam