On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 09:37:41AM -0500, Steve Crocker wrote: > The issue of diagrams is entangled in the long-standing discussion of > proprietary formats. There is a huge benefit in having a format that > *everyone* can access without difficulty or cost. I can't begin to > tell you the impact I felt when I walked into a university half way > around the world in an underdeveloped country and had a graduate > student show me some pretty sophisticated stuff he had done based on > RFCs he had downloaded from the net. ASCII is an enormous advantage > from that respect. What I find strange about this, though, is the reluctance to adopt PDF. It's a well-known open standard. There are plenty of free software interpreters and writers around, and Ghostscript passed the threshold for good output 2 or 3 versions ago. I understand the difficulty of machine parsing, but wouldn't an XML format with human oriented output in PDF be nice? (I suppose I'm asking whether there's some historical flamewar over this that I managed never to look at, in which case I'll just keep my mouth shut.) Of course, even if that was solved, the features of Word that other like are not really available in most of the XML tools, AFAIK. A -- ---- Andrew Sullivan 204-4141 Yonge Street Afilias Canada Toronto, Ontario Canada <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> M2P 2A8 +1 416 646 3304 x4110 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf