Subject: Personal contribution to ISO/IEC on some problems with WinWord or RTF formats for ISO/IEC electronic document distribution

From: "Alain LaBont/e'/" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 16:07:14 -0400

For your information.

Dear Mr. Brannon,

I already signaled, as an editor, problems that were encountered in SC18/WG9
with incompatibility of different national versions of WinWord format, which
is one of the generic formats recommended by JTC1 as an acceptable format.

I understand that this generic format was recommended for practical
purposes. But on the same ground, I can report the following facts:

-ISO/IEC DIS 14755 was produced (in both English and French versions) on a 
 Canadian French version of Win Word 6.0. The document so produced could not
 be reproduced on paper without errors on the Japanese English and American 
 English versions of WinWord 6.0. This has delayed the work for 3 months. I 
 had to resend documents by air mail to Japan and the USA twice (we believed 
 the files were corrupted) without solving this problem which could not be 
 solved in fact.

 Only a paper copy could guarantee the integrity of the document (that
 necessitated local correction of the electronic document). Fortunately we
 are catching up now, results were excellent on this particular document.

 The provisional reworking of the DIS in view of producing the final text of 
 the IS in London led to the same problems (fortunately I know what is going 
 on now and can issue the appropriate warnings to the involved secretariats 
 but not all editors are aware of this).

 I have personally seen that the UK English version of WinWord 6.0 was 
 considering that the page numbering of the Canadian-French-Word-version text 
 is using a wrong parameter (an esoteric message appeared on the screen and on 
 paper the following message appears on each page instead of the page number:
 "Error! Unknown switch argument". That reproduced the non printability 
 problems of the previous document in Japan and in the USA.

 I heard from a Japanese delegate that the Japanese version is also 
 incompatible with the English version, at least for WinWord 6 and WinWord 7. 
 We have to be aware of such problems if the recommendations continue to 
 stand and in practice I do not contest these recommendations until we find
 more universal non-proprietary formats.

-I also tried using the RTF format. Now RTF format does not seem to support 
 embedded TT fonts (at least in the Canadian French version) and this feature 
 was essential in reproducing the keyboard symbols that were using an Everson
 monospacing font (no warning is given though). 

 Such a level of detail is important as editors assume that their document's
integrity will be respected with a given format, which is not the case at
all  here. In fact I am afraid that the RTF files that I sent to you
recently via  Internet were received corrupted because of this, maybe
without your 
 noticing it. I understand that we use RTF format  to circumvent the 7-bit 
 Internet SMTP problem but this does not ultimately  solve the problem of 
 fonts so perhaps this format is not so appropriate.

I do not want to jeopardize JTC1 recommendations but I thought I had the
duty to report to ITTF this problem which could considerably affect editor's
and ISO work in other areas. Recommendations should be improved *in order to
document potential problems*. Perhaps (I believe it is likely in fact) in
the future, with the use of ISO/IEC 10646 coding, and with internationalized
versions of software (same versions just localized with external files),
this kind of problems will vanish. But now it is not yet the case that it
does not affect us. Of course the mandatory paper document that has to
accompany an electronic file at the involved secretariat is a wise precaution.

Alain LaBonté
Standards Project editor
 in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG9 
and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20

cc ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG9
   ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20