From: Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>
Date: 2002-08-23T03:42:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Win32 Scripting

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 14:29, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

> Sorry I can't comment on the technique you want... but I
> thought I'd comment on one thing just in case it was an
> issue.
> 
> My understanding is probably flawed, but I thought that
> RTF (though touted as an open standard) was really a
> Microsoftism that was intimately tied to the "latest"
> implementation of MS Word.
> 
> Microsoft (perhaps even worse than IBM) thinks that
> everything they do is a standard.
> 
> Of course, every standard originates somewhere. PDF comes
> from Adobe, though it may arguably be more open.
> 
> There's always XHTML; what could be more open than that?
> But it may not be what you need.
> 
> Now pardon me while I go back to my paperwork for
> patenting the ASCII character set.

Um, dunno what to say; RTF works perfectly, and is quite documented.  I
can find more complete RTF readers/editors than I can PDF ones (I can't
name a single free PDF reader that handles all PDF documents perfectly,
especially when you get into embedded forms and the like.)

The problem with XHTML/HTML is simply lack of support across the board. 
Sure, a lot of Open Source editors handle it well, but that's not true
for the popular suites in many cases.  On the other hand, if I can get a
script that does what I want, I may just as well put up the documents in
multiple formats (RTF, PDF, XHTML, blah, and so on), which would be nice
as well.

> 
> Hal
> 
>