Re: FYI: The dangers of bad standards (was Re: viewer for doc files) (fwd)

Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 13:22:57 +0000

On Thu, Mar 12, 1998 at 03:09:38PM +0300, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> I've seen .doc documents in industrial, and even in scientific settings.
> Very bad publishing practice.
> On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, Suman_Saraf wrote:
>
> > Anyone aware of free utilities for Linux which allow you to
> > view .DOC files from Word pr at least convert them to postscript ?

http://www.stardivision.com/

Get a copy of StarOffice 4.0. It's a shareware (free for noncommercial use
on Linux) MS Office clone. Won't read Orofice 97 documents (with the
embedded core dumps ;-) but it works fine on most other Micro$oft
formats.

This problem _should_ go away if Micro$oft stick to their promise to support
XML in their next product release cycle -- if, of course, they don't
hijack XML for their own purposes.

-- Charlie