The value of a richer format (Word, for those who have Word, HTML, for those who have a browser, etc) is that it can include more information. For example, borwsers can extract the headings from an HTML page and present a "page outline" (word does a similar thing, and did it first) that should give a good guide to where the important parts are - a simple table of contents with some idea of the relative importance. Or can skip over a list of items easily. Or can extract a list of the links (many JAWS users navigate by this technique, because they learn it early, although it isn't nearly as powerful for reading documents as an outline view). etc. The worst case is that users still just get plain text. The best case is that they get a lot more information, that was once only encoded by means of fairly visually-oriented formatting conventions derived from paper, and have tools that can do useful things with it. cheers Charles McCN On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Dave Mielke wrote: That doesn't answer my question. A simple text file is no more than a simple text file. It has very little inherrent formatting in it. Converting it to rtf, html, or even all the way to Word, can't improve on that, so why does it need to be done before handing it off to a Word user. What's wrong with giving the Windows user the plain old text file and letting Word convert it from plain text into its own format? What am I missing? Perhaps Word can't read a plain text file. If that's so, then I stand corrected? If it can, then why use something else to convert the document for it? -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +1 617 258 5999 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)