RE: [semi-OT] PDFs vs. Word (was Re: Comments and questions)

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> limits the choices much more. Sure, there's Word for Windows and Mac, and
> StarOffice also opens Word files, but PDF is a better choice for
> distribution to the world at large simply because many more platforms have
> viewers available for them.

Plus the specification is very well-defined and doesn't change dramatically
every couple of years.  In ten years, odds are your Word97 files won't be
supported by Word2010; that'd be like Word2000 supporting Word 3.0, by
comparison.  But since PDF is an open standard, there will pretty much
always be software capable of rendering it.  You'd have a much harder time
worrying about bit-rot than you would no longer having software which can
read it--after all, if it's that important to render the file, you can
always write your own renderer since the PDF spec is in the open literature.

Compare this to word-processor formats.

> Additionally, Word is a word processor, and this means that what you see

WYSIWYG is exactly that; what *you* see is what *you* get.  No guarantee the
next guy will see anything even vaguely resembling the same thing.  I'd much
prefer to get text material in XHTML, XML or PDF than I would a Word
document; at least then I can apply my own stylistic conveniences to the
semantic/syntactic structure of the document.