e-mail formats (was Re: Pre-doctoral position available)

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "RS" == Ralf Stephan <address@hidden> writes:

RS> Alex:
>> It's best not to post Micosoft Word documents to the list for
>> several reasons: 1) a good percentage of our users (I'm one) run
>> Unix exclusively (Solaris and Linux being the most popular) and
>> hence have no facility to read Word documents (unless they've

RS> man catdoc

Yes, yes, I know about catdoc, and we have it installed, and I used
it, but with all due respect to its developers, it only parses about
90% of most docs correctly, and I have complete sympathy for them
trying to play catch-up with Microsoft's constant changing of the
format.  You often end up with funny looking characters and tables get
completely munged.  It's OK for just getting the raw text if you
desperately need it, in emergency situations, but not for everyday
reading of Word documents (not that I'd want to be reading Word docs
on an everyday basis!)

RS> Un*x is better than you think it is, ralf --

I'm not knocking Un*x, only suggesting that proprietary formats which
aren't well supported on all operating systems aren't the best format
for interchange with a large number of people whose operating systems
you don't know in advance.  PDF is a nice compromise for sending via
private e-mail (though not for posting to lists of course!)

Alex
-- 
Alex Lancaster * address@hidden * www.santafe.edu/~alex * 505 984-8800 x242
Santa Fe Institute (www.santafe.edu) & Swarm Development Group (www.swarm.org)


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