> I do believe that, if you want to do initial document > preparation in Word, you should be able to do that. As others > have suggested, no one I know of is really interested in > standardizing on or requiring a particular editor. But, to do > so, you need to be able to produce an editable format that is no > worse than ASCII. You may have better ideas, but, as I have > explored that range of options, I've come to the conclusion that > there ought to be two ways to accomplish that end. They are: > > (1) Development of an "IETF printer driver" that can be > distributed as freeware or with minimal costs and > restrictions and that would produce lines and pages of > the right layouts _and_ would handle "smart character" > to ASCII conversions, generation of appropriate > line-ending sequences, etc. Whomever developed this > thing would need to make a long-term commitment to > producing and maintaining versions for every version of > Windows from, I think, Win98 through the indefinite > future. The generic printer and the conventions of RFC > 3285 are demonstrably not good enough. A completely correct observation: Since the draft-stage of RFC 3285, I have been using MS-Word as editing tool, and appreciated the WYSIWYG and tracking advantages of it. However, since the output of the M$ generic printer driver has changed for *EACH* version of Windows, I have had to update the parser each time I wanted to support a new Windows variant, I now have one parser for NT4, one for 98, one for 2000, one for XP, and I even had to improve the XP version to work properly with Office 2003 under 2000. This could be done, and it only affected me who decided to still use Word as my editing tool. I still believe Word may be a proper choice for draft editors, but they should be aware of the problems, and Word is for sure not a proper format for publishing documents. /L-E _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf