OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Laurence]

On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 10:16 +0300, Itay Furman wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Tim wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > I still have word processor documents stored in about 6 or 7 unreadable
> > formats on various discs.  About my only chance of conversion, with
> > layout, is scanning and OCR.  If I just wanted content, and didn't mind
> > re-laying out the content, I could save as plain text.  It really is a
> > stupid situation to still be in.
> 
> This is one reason why I prefer the tex/latex model of 
> typesetting documents, and avoid Office.
> 
> My LaTeX documents, written in the beginning of the '90, will 
> probably compile under today's tex/latex without any 
> modifications.  If not -- changes to only few lines should be 
> enough to redeem most documents (there is no problem in doing the 
> modifications since the latex source is just plain ascii file). 
> Which means that I could always read the document's _contents_.
> 
>   	Itay
> 

One obvious advantage of open source is that no matter what happens to
the binaries, you always have the source code.
In the situation where the program is no longer available or you need to
convert from an old format, you have the code to look at or alternatly
recompile the source code. Has anyone got a copy of Visicalc these days?
I know its not a word processor, but the principle is the same. SO if
when you store all your documents in a particular format, make sure you
have a copy of the source code to save with them.