Re: [tlug] CrossOver Office

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 06:19:57PM +0900, Micheal E Cooper wrote:
> 
> But I do understand what some mean by not having any choice but to use
> Office because of their clients. In my case, my company uses Office, and all
> documents must be accessible from all computers. All the data entry that our
> clients request is for Excel, or rarely Word. Is there an open publishing
> standard like xhtml for word processing?

1) Are you asking the right question? I.e., why is the notion of "word
   processing" important--to you, that is--not speaking of ordinary users
   here? The point of this question is that if you open up the field a
   bit, you find things like LaTeX--bear with me a moment--which is an
   open publishing standard, but is considered to be something a bit
   different from "word processing."

   I'm not suggesting anyone try to make the whole word type LaTeX by
   hand. I think that battle's been fought and lost already. But there
   are more user-friendly solutions, like LyX (www.lyx.org), which is
   a word-processoresque GUI that generates LaTeX output. It's a very
   solid and full-featured application. Unfortunately, in addition to
   asking users to learn new concepts about working with documents (new
   concepts! scary!), it isn't user-friendly enough: it uses the clunky
   (and I believe non-free) XForms GUI toolkit, and the default shortcut
   keys are, AFAIK, unprecedented in either the Unix or the Windows
   world. Still, if you were doing primarily print-oriented work, it
   might be worth checking out. I've never seriously attempted to inter-
   operated LyX with foreign document formats.

2) Can you use RTF? It's sort of open. At least, being text-based, you
   can decipher it the next time MS makes undocumented changes. And I
   did an experiment a couple of weeks ago where I saved a document in
   RTF, gave it a .doc file extension, and, やっぱり, I could double-
   click on it and Word stated up and loaded the doc without comment,
   just as if it were a real .doc. Maybe you can do something similar
   with Excel and a text-based file format pretending to be an .xls.
   Opens up possibilities, doesn't it? Of course, if this practice
   becomes widespread, MS will undoubtedly invent the
   msOfficeIncorrectFileExtensionError (for your protection, of course!).

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@example.com
http://www.havenrock.com/