(j3.2006) ballot comments

[Lionel, Steve]

ASCII offers no formatting help, no in-document links, no ability to
embed images or diagrams, etc.  It's fine for simple things (such as
these emails) but is not adequate for larger or more complex documents.
You also have the issue of international character sets to deal with. As
for editing, plain text is awful when you need to prepare for a
publication format.

I'm not saying Word is perfect, but I don't see a usable alternative.  

Steve

> -----Original Message-----
> From: j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org [mailto:j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org] On
> Behalf Of Bill Long
> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 5:06 PM
> To: fortran standards email list for J3
> Subject: Re: (j3.2006) ballot comments
> 
> 
> 
> Lionel, Steve wrote:
> > The question is - what would you recommend as a widely-available and
> > used alternative?
> 
> What's wrong with ASCII, which actually is a standard?  A plain ASCII
> file is both much easier to edit and also takes up less disk space
than
> the proprietary MS format.  It's very easy for people to define "what
I
> use" to be the "standard".  Considering that INCITS is in the
standards
> business, they should know better.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bill
> 
> 
> > Like it or not, most people consider Word the
> > "standard" for editable document interchange. Word or
Word-compatible
> > tools are available for the major desktop platforms.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org [mailto:j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org]
> On
> >> Behalf Of Michael Ingrassia
> >> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 4:41 PM
> >> To: j3 at j3-fortran.org
> >> Subject: Re: (j3.2006) ballot comments
> >>
> >>
> >>> Doesn't Sun's free OpenOffice support reading and writing .doc
> files
> >>>
> >> on
> >>
> >>> Linux/Mac?
> >>>
> >> Yes, http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US has downloads
> >> for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OSX.
> >>
> >> There's really no reason for INCITS to require Word, and it doesn't
> >> promote INCITS standards.  Is there some way we can protest?
> >>
> >> 	--Michael I.
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> J3 mailing list
> >> J3 at j3-fortran.org
> >> http://j3-fortran.org/mailman/listinfo/j3
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > J3 at j3-fortran.org
> > http://j3-fortran.org/mailman/listinfo/j3
> >
> 
> --
> Bill Long                                   longb at cray.com
> Fortran Technical Support    &              voice: 651-605-9024
> Bioinformatics Software Development         fax:   651-605-9142
> Cray Inc., 1340 Mendota Heights Rd., Mendota Heights, MN, 55120
> 
> 
> 
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