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Re: printable online docs


At 10:18 AM 4/3/02 +0200, Hans Ronne wrote:
> >Aw, foo, just because something is Microsoft-born doesn't mean it's the
> >devil's work. =P
>
>Agreed. There are two separate questions here. One is if there are license
>issues with the file format that would prevent its use in a GPL packet. I
>am not aware of any such restrictions on using the RTF format. The other
>question is if you need un-free software in order to read the file. I don't
>think that is the case either.

   General agreement.  However, be aware that there is support in the U.S. 
for making various sorts of reverse-engineering even more illegal than it 
has been made recently.  Some industry types seem to be in favor of 
legislation, or an interpretation thereof, where reverse-engineering *file 
formats* would be illegal.  I, and most technology types not working for a 
megacorp, hope this does not come to pass.  However, it seems prudent to 
avoid file formats set by any particular company (as opposed to, say, 
international standards committees) unless they have been specifically put 
under an open source friendly license.

   In the meantime, IMO the most useful formats to have the docs in is some 
sort of "source" format that is the official version, and to have readily 
available converters for plain ASCII, HTML and PDF that preserve as much of 
the structure as practical in their respective formats.  A direct 
Postscript version might occasionally be handy for printing, but I suspect 
that anyone who needs that can use Ghostscript off of the PDF format, so it 
would be a much lower priority.  The source format should probably be based 
on ASCII with tags, so that it is amenable to various sorts of diff, grep, 
and patch commands.

** James **

-- 
James R. Dunson (jdunson@vt.edu)
Network Administrator, Center for Wireless Telecommunications
436 Whittemore Hall, Virginia Tech     http://www.cwt.vt.edu/


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