From everson@indigo.ie Sat Oct 12 11:03:07 1996 Received: from aoife.indigo.ie (aoife.indigo.ie [194.125.133.9]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id LAA06856; Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:03:06 +0100 Received: from [194.125.148.177] (ts10-04.dublin.indigo.ie [194.125.148.177]) by aoife.indigo.ie (8.7.5/8.7.5) with SMTP id LAA14030; Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:01:47 +0100 (BST) X-Sender: everson@mail.indigo.ie Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:03:06 +0100 To: Michel Suignard From: everson@indigo.ie (Michael Everson) Subject: Re: (SC22WG20.1658) RE: Personal contribution to ISO/IEC on some problems with WinWordor RTF formats for ISO/IEC electronic document distribution Cc: "'brannon@isocs.iso.ch'" , "'sc18wg9@dkuug.dk'" , "'sc22wg20@dkuug.dk'" , "'Alain LaBont/e'/'" A wide variety of formats should be supported. At present I have problems using PDF formats, because the PDF extensions don't seem to like (this is my guess) all the WorldScripts I have installed. Or maybe it is just the Chinese. I don't much like RTF either -- I have had bad experiences with people trying to send me Russian code page RTF files and then the RTF converter mucks it up because it decides that it's some Latin code page. It is unacceptable for standards bodies to insist 1) on PC platform formats and 2) on specific vendors' products. It is certainly true that in CEN/TC304 we could produce very few of our standards with such limitations (so we provide camera-ready copy for them). The Apple Macintosh may be in the minority -- but minorities of many kinds have rights! And there is a richness possible on the Macintosh -- just as there is in many minority languages! -- that is unavailable elsewhere. ISO shall not make rules which force people to give money to specific vendor= s. Currently I do a lot of my own standards work using HTML, which is platform independent and permits high Web-visibility. See my web pages. I take the majority into account by choosing HTML. Regards, -- Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta 15 Port Chaeimhghein =CDochtarach; Baile =C1tha Cliath 2; =C9ire (Ireland) Guth=E1in: +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396 http://www.indigo.ie/egt 27 P=E1irc an Fh=E9ithlinn; Baile an Bh=F3thair; Co. =C1tha Cliath; =C9ire