On 21/09/14 16:05, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 21/09/14 15:00, tony sayer wrote:
Well these were one's from academic establishments and I rather doubt
they'd sod them up,

touching naievete ;-)

and I have heard of others who still have
compatibility problems. It seems that there are still issues when using
all three programs..

Even people with Word have problems with Word compatibilty - google it..

+1

Word is incompatible with itself, basically. Cross-platform? Yes, you
can get Word for Mac and Windows, but even within either platform
different versions can do different things.

To be fair, it works *mostly*. Too many people, though, just use spaces
and the return key to format their docs. They've barely heard of the
tab key (or setting tabs), and even more rarely of page breaks or
styles. I've even seen multi-column stuff done that way, too.

yeah, and when a PR professional tells you that 'PDFS are not a
universal format' .DOCX (Microsoft office 2014 is)' you spend a happy
hour showing why the government specifies all documents for distribution
should be in PDF format, and the first few hundred instances of
incompatible docx formats you can find on a rapid google.

The ONLY way to guarantee format, and that is why printers now
universally accept it as the primary way to receive digital copy, is a
PDF with the correct fonts embedded.

PDF can and does specify each letter to a microinch, what exact font is
to be used and what color it should be.

Prior to that you had to specify the program (quark Xpress usually) and
send a complete 'collection - all the fonts and images to be used.

There can be no guarantee that a given Word document will look the same
on two machines since it doesn't do microinch spec and it doesn't embed
fonts.

At best it works on two identical operating system equipped machines
with exactly the same version of Word and exactly the same font set.

I expect that if I get a WORD document it wont be correctly formatted.
Tex overflowing text boxes, and pagebreaks in illogical places, usually
because some 'artistic' genius has selected some weird font that's only
available on their machine. And instead of setting up style sheets has
done it all with a space bar.







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Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
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