BBC News - Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: 'Why I still use DOS'

[Gary Welles]

Martin describes WordStar 4.0 as the "Duesenberg of word-processing
software (very old, but unsurpassed)":

<http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502>

which would say a lot about VDE and CP/M.

-- Gary

[Mark P. Fishman]

YES!

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--
"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's
just sort of a tired feeling."
-- Paula Poundstone

[dmccunney]

George, and Canadian SF writer Robert Sawyer are both big WordStar
fans. Sawyer has a fan page for it:
http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

SF writer Elizabeth Moon is another who started on WordStar. She
uses Word these days because that's what publishers expect, but she
talks about occasionally running WordStar when she's stuck on
something in a manuscript. It provides a comfort level that helps her
get past the problem.

(NB: I've known George for many years. I first met him at the
beginning of his writing career when he was making his living running
chess tournaments, and complaining that he was unlikely to progress
form Expert to Master because he was too busy running tournaments to
compete in them. I knew his wife Parris before she hooked up with
George. Splendid folks.)

> -- Gary
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

[Eric Meyer]

Gary Welles wrote:
> Martin describes WordStar 4.0 as the "Duesenberg of word-processing
> software (very old, but unsurpassed)":

Thanks, always nice to read something like that as I sit here running Win XP
(with the even older Windows Classic theme, of course) and VDE in a CMD
window. I actually switched to WordPerfect years ago when it was the academic
standard, instead of a Windows version of WordStar. But when I'm just
brainstorming or writing rather than publishing, my pinky is on the (Caps-to-)
Ctrl key in VDE, and WS 4 is still there somewhere if I wanted it. I have
tons of text files, and think it's just weird that most people today don't
even know what plain text or a text editor are.

Of course in these wired days, I spend a lot of time in a browser and mail
client. And I find that there too, an important principle applies: don't
change what works, especially in the user interface. Unfortunately the
fashionable approach today seems to be a crazy rampage of monthly releases,
constantly fiddling with appearance and the UI. What an annoyance, and loss
of productivity! I finally updated to Firefox 28(!), just in time to avoid a
massive UI redesign 6 weeks(!) later. And I'm still using Thunderbird 2,
about 5 years old now; it does what I need without requiring further thought.
There's a nice degree of customizability with Mozilla products... which
people often wind up using just to revert changes they don't like. Fins on
cars in 1950s Detroit were silly too, but they didn't rearrange the pedals
every year. This is ridiculous.

-- Eric Meyer.

[Robert Bull]

Thursday, May 15, 2014, 8:01:12 PM, Eric Meyer wrote:

> I finally updated to Firefox 28(!), just in time to avoid a massive
> UI redesign 6 weeks(!) later.

I'm seeing folk in the DonationCoder forums turning away from Firefox
to Pale Moon, for that sort of reason. Quote from their home page at
http://www.palemoon.org/:

"... there are a few other differences between Pale Moon and Firefox that
are more obvious and not just "under the hood": contrary to what
Mozilla has done with their redesign of the user interface, Pale Moon
will continue to provide a familiar set of controls and visual
feedback similar to previous versions, including grouped navigation
buttons of a decent size, a bookmarks toolbar that is enabled by
default, tabs next to page content by default (easily switchable) and
not in the least a functional status bar and more freedom in
customization, to name a few things."


--
Regards,
Robert Bull mailto:robert...@googlemail.com

[dmccunney]

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Eric Meyer <xor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Gary Welles wrote:
>>
>> Martin describes WordStar 4.0 as the "Duesenberg of word-processing
>> software (very old, but unsurpassed)":
>
> Thanks, always nice to read something like that as I sit here running Win XP
> (with the even older Windows Classic theme, of course) and VDE in a CMD
> window. I actually switched to WordPerfect years ago when it was the
> academic standard, instead of a Windows version of WordStar. But when I'm
> just brainstorming or writing rather than publishing, my pinky is on the
> (Caps-to-) Ctrl key in VDE, and WS 4 is still there somewhere if I wanted
> it. I have tons of text files, and think it's just weird that most people
> today don't even know what plain text or a text editor are.

Why should they? They never need to deal with plain text. Word
processors differed from text editors in that the end product was
assumed to be a printed page, where you cared what the page *looked
like* as well as what it said, and word processors added features to
control the appearance of the end result. While the output is
increasingly *not* a printed page, the appearance is still a factor,
and with bit mapped GUI screens, even email can have fancy formatting.

The folks who do still deal with plain text files are largely
developers, as source code is stored in plain text files to be fed to
a compiler. The compiler doesn't care what it looks like - only that
it will parse and compile.

And even developers may abjure plain text. There's a bit of
discussion on another list I'm on about text based config files you
modify in an editor. The problem with that is that you must
understand the config file format and know what to change in the
editor to get the desired effect, so we see GUI front ends designed to
reduce the difficulty and relieve the developer of the need to know
the details of the config file format. (The canonical Horrible
Example is the config file used by the sendmail mail transfer agent
widely used on Unix/Linux systems. Original sendmail author Eric
Allman admitted a while back that he erred in making sendmail.cf files
easy for the program to parse but difficult for human beings to
understand and modify. If you have a choice, you don't diddle
sendmail.cf manually - you use a third party tool to do it, or you
run something other than sendmail.)

> Of course in these wired days, I spend a lot of time in a browser and mail
> client. And I find that there too, an important principle applies: don't
> change what works, especially in the user interface. Unfortunately the
> fashionable approach today seems to be a crazy rampage of monthly releases,
> constantly fiddling with appearance and the UI. What an annoyance, and loss
> of productivity! I finally updated to Firefox 28(!), just in time to avoid
> a massive UI redesign 6 weeks(!) later. And I'm still using Thunderbird 2,
> about 5 years old now; it does what I need without requiring further
> thought. There's a nice degree of customizability with Mozilla products...
> which people often wind up using just to revert changes they don't like.
> Fins on cars in 1950s Detroit were silly too, but they didn't rearrange the
> pedals every year. This is ridiculous.

Ah, you've encountered the joy that is Australis. Mozilla has been
working on this for a while, and the changes didn't land on schedule.
I run Firefox Nightly, so I've had the new design for a while. The
intentions behind Australis were good, but they don't seem to have
checked to see how existing FF users would feel about the new UI.
Response has been, um, mixed, with typical comments like "It looks
like Chrome. If I wanted something that looked like Chrome, I'd *use*
Chrome!".

The big problem for a lot of people is that Australis removes the
Addon bar, and Addon icons wind up in the Nav bar, the way Chrome does
things. If you have any volume of addons, that becomes problematic.
(I have 46.)

Fortunately, there are addons for that.

To make Australis usable, I use Aris's Classic Theme Restorer, and
Quicksaver's The Puzzle Piece.

Classic Theme Restorer can make Australis look life pre-Australis
Firefox versions. I don';t - I just use it to get back the addon bar,
so that all of the addon icons don't wind up on the nav bar. The
Puzzle Piece lets me choose where the addon bar displays. I have it
set to appear in the URL box. A small green puzzle piece icon is
placed in the URL bar, which expands when moused over to display the
addon bar icons and let me click the one I need to use.

See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/
and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-puzzle-piece/ ,
respectively.

> -- Eric Meyer.
______
Dennis

[Eric Meyer]

dmccunney wrote:
> Why should they? They never need to deal with plain text.

Need? Why wouldn't they want to? Much of the time text is just information,
and there's never going to be printed output, so no, appearance is not a
factor, and I don't want it in some clumsy proprietary format that fusses
about that (and will be hard to translate a decade later).

> The intentions behind Australis were good, but they don't seem to have
> checked to see how existing FF users would feel about the new UI.

Why mess with a new UI? Who is it for? The problem isn't that Firefox now
looks like Chrome, though that does seem stupid, but that a whole new UI
installed itself automatically like just another incremental update (unless
you prevented it). I find it hard to believe that any users would want that.

I don't want to turn this into a Mozilla thread (there's already a ton of
rants about this online)... I was just using Australis as an obvious recent
example of unnecessary, disruptive change. The waste of the developers' time
is dwarfed by that of the users. I expect that from a company like Microsoft,
but why should it happen now with open-source software too?

-- Eric Meyer.

[dmccunney]

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 8:35 PM, Eric Meyer <xor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> dmccunney wrote:
>>
>> Why should they? They never need to deal with plain text.
>
> Need? Why wouldn't they want to? Much of the time text is just
> information, and there's never going to be printed output, so no, appearance
> is not a factor, and I don't want it in some clumsy proprietary format that
> fusses about that (and will be hard to translate a decade later).

Think email. While I'm one of those who prefers plain text for email,
many or perhaps most don't The dominant format for email these days
is HTML, which lets you do things like use color, fonts, embedded
images, and hyperlinks. Your email client interprets the HTML and
displays the formatted message on screen the same was a browser
displays a web page.

People really do care about stuff like that, even if it arguably is
cosmetic and not intrinsically necessary for communication. The nadir
is probably the packages of animated smileys you can use in email, but
I tend to not exchange mail with people who use such things. We
simply have nothing meaningful to say to each other.

HTML is not a proprietary format, and proprietary formats are slowly
going away. Current version of Microsoft Word, for example, store
documents in XML, and the underlying document is plain text. Word
parses the XML and obeys the formatting instructions specified in it,
so what you see is colors, fonts, text attributes, embedded image and
the like. The old proprietary format was simply a different and more
opaque way of doing the same thing: specifying what the document
should *look* like. (Of course, since it's Microsoft, their version
of XML diverges somewhat from the official standard, and they caused
some fuss a while back by trying to push their version *as* the
standard.)

>> The intentions behind Australis were good, but they don't seem to have
>> checked to see how existing FF users would feel about the new UI.
>
> Why mess with a new UI? Who is it for? The problem isn't that Firefox now
> looks like Chrome, though that does seem stupid, but that a whole new UI
> installed itself automatically like just another incremental update (unless
> you prevented it). I find it hard to believe that any users would want
> that.

Firefox went to a rapid release model a while back. Instead of
occasional big releases that added a lot of new features and fixes,
they went to a new version every three months, with fixes and less
changes. By default, you get new versions and any updates to addons
you use automatically. Google Chrome does the same thing. So does
Opera, though Opera now uses the same open source rendering engine
Chrome does.

Australis is actually the first major interface redesign in a long
time. The last really major change to Firefox was the transition from
v3.X to 4, because there were changes to the underlying architecture
that broke an assortment of existing extensions. The extensions
relied on the way FF used to do things, and stopped working when that
changed. FF still *looked* the same, but what it did under the hood
was different.

The Australis redesign has it roots in the increasing migration to
mobile devices. People are using browsers on notebooks, netbooks, and
tablets, and the scarce resource is screen real estate. The goal of
Australis was to simplify the interface and reduce the amount of space
taken by the browser chrome to leave more room for what you were
browsing.

Australis is intended to look and act pretty much the same on any
device you run FF on. I have it on an Android tablet, and it's quite
similar to what I see on my desktop.

It doesn't perturb me as much as it perturbs others because I know how
to make it look and act as I prefer.

> I don't want to turn this into a Mozilla thread (there's already a ton of
> rants about this online)... I was just using Australis as an obvious recent
> example of unnecessary, disruptive change. The waste of the developers'
> time is dwarfed by that of the users. I expect that from a company like
> Microsoft, but why should it happen now with open-source software too?

It's always been a problem with open source software, and a persistent
complaint about open source offerings is poor UI design.

I think the issue has a lot to do with the relationship between the
developers and the users. In commercial software, developers are paid
to work on the products, and the money in their paychecks comes from
sales of the products they work on. There is a strong incentive to
pay attention to customers and attempt to provide what they want so
that they *buy* the product. Developers don't code what they feel
like - they code what their manager tells them to code.

In open source, the relationship is very different. Most developers
working on open source products don't get paid for it. They do it as
a sideline activity, and make their living writing commercial
products. Generally speaking, if you get paid for writing open source
code, you work for a company like Google, Facebook, or IBM that uses a
lot of open source code and pays you to work on what they need it to
do. Those not getting paid for it are either scratching a personal
itch, working on code that they use, or are in it for community
status. Things like "I have commit access to the Linux kernel git
repository and Linus accepts my changes to the code" are major status
markers.

So you get what Jamie Zawinski called the "teenage attention deficit"
model of coding. Jamie has been around a long time. He was one of
the Netscape developers back when Netscape was an independent company,
and one of the original employees of Mozilla when the Mozilla project
was spun off from AOL. Jamie was fulminating about the changes in the
Gnome desktop environment that was widely used in Linux. Gnome 2 had
a list of unfixed bugs as long as your arm. But fixing bugs isn't
*fun*. Writing *new* code is fun. So instead of a properly fixed
version of Gnome 2, we got a redesigned Gnome 3, with a whole new set
of bugs unlikely to get fixed. The developers were not responsible to
the users, and had little incentive to care what the folks who will
actually run their code think. They were writing what they wanted to
write, and end user satisfaction wasn't a criteria in what they did.

Mozilla has an overall mission to improve the web and develop web
standards, but that isn't quite the same thing as making users happy.
The problem with the Australis UI redesign is that it was conceived in
a vacuum as a needed change to position Firefox and other Mozilla
products for the future, but there doesn't seem to have been any
effort to reach out to the existing user base, explain what they were
up to, and get feedback on what the actual users wanted. We don't pay
for Firefox, so we lack the leverage of voting with our wallets and
refusing to buy if we are unhappy with the direction things are going.
I don't know of a good solution to the underlying problem

> -- Eric Meyer.
______
Dennis

https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

[Eric Meyer]

dmccunney wrote:
> In commercial software, developers are paid
> to work on the products, and the money in their paychecks comes from
> sales of the products they work on. There is a strong incentive to
> pay attention to customers and attempt to provide what they want so
> that they *buy* the product.

So that's what produces crowd-pleasers like Vista or Win 8? The question here
seems to be where developers (paid or not, apparently) get their idea of "what
people want", because it always seems very strange. What everyone I know
actually wants is an uninterrupted workflow, with modest improvements where
possible and fixes when necessary. Not a radical new UI, or huge buggy
sluggish new features they have no use for, and a constant flow of fixes for
those.

-- Eric Meyer.

[Gary Welles]

Eric Meyer wrote:

> I actually switched to WordPerfect years ago when it was the academic

> standard, . . ..

Silly me, I would have guessed Nota Bene <http://www.notabene.com/>
"Software for Academic Research & Writing".

I often wonder how Goldilocks now goes about choosing a "just right" word
processor. My guess is that old fashioned trial and error has been
replaced by an unerring survey of thousands of doctors, lawyers, Indian
chiefs,
prostitutes, etc..

-- Gary

[Moy Wong]

Hmm. I think that, for many, the choice of a "just right" word
processor is the one that can open (and correctly render and print) That
New Document that the next person sends you. Ever notice how people
(who use MSWord) think that *any* "document" can just be "opened,"
without regard for what was used to create it?

Without even attempting to resave in an older version's format (or
horrors, another w/p format), those are the same people who would tell
you that "YOU have to upgrade" when you can't open their file.

So people buying new computers with preinstalled software off the shelf
fall in to conflicts with people who bought their software last year.

I've often urged people to share documents by first agreeing to a "least
common denominator" format. Some years ago, I had decent success
getting collaborators to save in WordPerfect 5.1 format. Of course (for
English, anyway), the text file format is the ultimate least common
denominator.

Don't get me going about websites who share information by offering
"documents" to download in--you guessed it--one of the MSWord formats.

-moy

ps Remember XyWrite?

]
]--

]

[Mark P. Fishman]

Not to be politically correct or anything, but I'd trust the opinion
of the prostitutes before any of the others. They have to use what
they buy, instead of making decisions for and about other people.

Yes, work has been getting to me lately.

-- Mark F.

[dmccunney]

The question is "Who is the customer?"

Microsoft is a B2B outfit, selling to companies, not end users at
retail. For Microsoft and Windows, you and I aren't the customer. We
for the most part don't buy Windows. We get it pre-installed on PCs
we buy, and we get a new version when we buy a newer PC that has it.

The customer is the OEM that pre-installs the Windows image on the
machine we buy, and the a lesser extent, the corporate CIO that signs
off on a site license for X hundreds or thousands of installations.

The big change in Vista that annoyed people was a change in the
permissions model. In Windows through XP, the user was assumed to be
the administrator of the machine will all powers to make changes.
This constituted a major security hole, as most exploits require
administrative rights to do their dirty work, and bounce off if the
user isn't running as administrator.

It's possible to run with lower privileges in XP. You can create a
Power User (XP Pro) or Limited User (XP Home) profile, and run as
that. Those users can *run* installed software, but not make changes
that affect the machine. At a former employer, users got machines
with XP and Office, with Power User profiles and a pre-installed set
of standard apps. If you needed something not part of the standard
set, you made a request, and someone like me with a Domain Admin
account would do the installation on your machine. This was a
security measure. We also had automatic updates turned on, though
they were served from our own WSUS server, and not deployed generally
before testing that they didn't inadvertently break something. That
had not always been the case, but became policy after we got bit by a
nasty virus that had me and others there till the wee hours of the
morning doing remediation. The virus got in via a hole that had been
patched a while back, but the machine it got in through didn't have
that patch applied.

In Vista/Win7/Win8, the default is that you run as a power user, and
become administrator only when you need to do something that affects
the machine. Vista made that a PITA. Win7 simplified the process and
was easier to deal with, (My personal feel is that it *should* have
been the default starting with Win2K, because the NTFS filesystem
supported the permissions model used.)

Win8 gets brickbats for the Metro interface. This is another case of
the influence of mobile devices. Microsoft has a flavor of Windows
for all sorts of things. There's a port of Win8 to ARM architecture
that runs on tablets, and Windows Phone for smartphones. Again, the
incentive is to have it look and act as similar as possible regardless
of what you run it on. It is possible to get to a more familiar
desktop in Win8, but is not the default. (There are rumors the next
maintenance release of Win8 will address that.)

And the fact that the OEMs who bundle Windows on machines we buy are
mostly the ones who actually pay MS for Windows licenses affects
things. They have an incentive to get users to buy newer, faster
machines. MS has an incentive to produce versions of Windows for
those newer faster machines. There was a kerfluffle about Vista in
that regard. MS *really* wanted to end XP and transition to the next
major Windows version. The problem was, the machines available at the
time Vista was released didn't necessarily have the hardware to run it
well. They would not pass MS's own certification tests. Vista really
needed the next generation of hardware that was in the pipeline but
not yet available. So MS created a new level of "Windows Capable",
below the certified level, so that OEMs could brand that machines with
MS's imprimatur. Former MS SVP Jim Allchin, who was in charge of
Windows development, was *very* unhappy at this. He predicted,
correctly, that users would not have a good experience trying to run
Vista on some of the machines it was released on, and that MS would
get Yet Another Black Eye in the marketplace. MS CEO Ken Ballmer
replied that he had nothing to do with that decision...

Current hardware has since addressed that problem, but it was fun
while it lasted. :-)

[dmccunney]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 9:31 AM, Gary Welles <ga...@wellesway.com> wrote:
> Eric Meyer wrote:
>
>> I actually switched to WordPerfect years ago when it was the academic
>> standard, . . ..
>
> Silly me, I would have guessed Nota Bene <http://www.notabene.com/>
> "Software for Academic Research & Writing".

WP became the default word processing standard, period. It ate
WordStar for lunch. Unfortunately, WP waited too long to produce a
version that would run on Windows. By the time the time they had one,
Word was already in the process of dominating the market.

Nota Bene was actually an OEM version of XyWrite with a customized
interface. I described XyWrite back when as "a language designed for
manipulating text, wrapped in a clever word processor disguise." You
could customize XyWrite dramatically. I knew a chap back when
supporting XyWriter in a corporate environment. His users were stock
market analysts. They downloaded real-time stock data from Tandem
mainframes, imported it into Lotus 1,2,3 to do analysis, and wrote
commentary in XyWrite on their analysis. He implemented a Lotus 1,2,3
menus bar style interface in XyWrite that hid the details and
presented a single simplified UI covering all parts of it to the
users.

Part of the problem XyWrite had was that the default interface was
arguably not that great, and while you could change it, you first had
to learn enough to know *how* to change it. Nota Bene was considered
to have a better default interface,.

XyWrite is long gone, but Nota Bene still exists, and XyWrite's former
lead developer is an investor in and contributes code to NB. The
fact that NB *had* a better default interface may have something to do
with why it still exists when what it was based on is no more.

> I often wonder how Goldilocks now goes about choosing a "just right" word
> processor. My guess is that old fashioned trial and error has been
> replaced by an unerring survey of thousands of doctors, lawyers, Indian
> chiefs, prostitutes, etc..

Nope. Most folks use what comes with the machine. For practical
purposes, that means Word under Windows.

[dmccunney]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Moy Wong <m...@panix.com> wrote:
> Hmm. I think that, for many, the choice of a "just right" word
> processor is the one that can open (and correctly render and print) That
> New Document that the next person sends you. Ever notice how people
> (who use MSWord) think that *any* "document" can just be "opened,"
> without regard for what was used to create it?

> Without even attempting to resave in an older version's format (or
> horrors, another w/p format), those are the same people who would tell
> you that "YOU have to upgrade" when you can't open their file.

> So people buying new computers with preinstalled software off the shelf
> fall in to conflicts with people who bought their software last year.

I had that issue a a prior employer. We did not have corporate
standards in place. The West Coast office bought a newer version of
Office than the one we used, and was sending us Word docs and Excel
spreadsheets we couldn't open. I wound up bringing in and installing
a personal copy of the newer version I used at home, to be able to
convert the files to something we could use.

> I've often urged people to share documents by first agreeing to a "least
> common denominator" format. Some years ago, I had decent success
> getting collaborators to save in WordPerfect 5.1 format. Of course (for
> English, anyway), the text file format is the ultimate least common
> denominator.
>
> Don't get me going about websites who share information by offering
> "documents" to download in--you guessed it--one of the MSWord formats.

Google has viewers for all common file types, so I don't care.
Firefox is set to open such things in the appropriate Google viewer.

> -moy
>
> ps Remember XyWrite?

Yes. Fondly.
______
Dennis

[Gary Welles]

Moy Wong wrote:

> Ever notice how people (who use MSWord) think that *any* "document" can
> just be "opened," without regard for what was used to create it?

Oh boy, do I ever! Fortunately since acquiring a Win7 machine all I have
to is click on the file and I'm presented with an opportunity to purchase
MS Office.

Complaining about proprietary formats, like teaching a pig to sing, would
only waste my time and annoy the sender. So I had been annoying myself by
unzipping the .doc/docx archives and looking for text in hex dumps of the
files.

Happily I just discovered Zamzar <http://www.zamzar.com/> file conversion
service which appears to do a credible job of converting .doc/.docx files
to .pdf.

-- Gary

[Mark P. Fishman]

There's always AntiWord (http://www.winfield.demon.nl/), and the folks
at Softmaker have free viewers for Word and Excel files
(http://www.officeviewers.com/), based on the code they use for their
wordprocessor and spreadsheet import filters.

Still, sometimes it's worth annoying the sender.

-- Mark F.

On 5/16/14, Gary Welles <ga...@wellesway.com> wrote:

> --
> ---Get VDE and related files at http://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "VDE_Editor" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to vde_editor+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

[dmccunney]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Gary Welles <ga...@wellesway.com> wrote:
> Moy Wong wrote:
>
>> Ever notice how people (who use MSWord) think that *any* "document" can
>> just be "opened," without regard for what was used to create it?
>
> Oh boy, do I ever! Fortunately since acquiring a Win7 machine all I have
> to is click on the file and I'm presented with an opportunity to purchase
> MS Office.

The open source Open Office/Libre Office packages should be able to open it.

http://openoffice.org

http://libreoffice.org

Open Office was a product of Sun Microsystems, who were acquired by
Oracle. Libre Office was a fork of the OO code created because many
folks simply didn't trust Oracle's longer term intentions. Oracle
subsequently turned Open Office over the the Apache Foundation.
Either should do what you want.

> Complaining about proprietary formats, like teaching a pig to sing, would
> only waste my time and annoy the sender. So I had been annoying myself by
> unzipping the .doc/docx archives and looking for text in hex dumps of the
> files.
>
> Happily I just discovered Zamzar <http://www.zamzar.com/> file conversion
> service which appears to do a credible job of converting .doc/.docx files
> to .pdf.

Simpler solution: install PDF Creator. It's an open source package
that installs as a printer. Print the file using the PDF Creator, and
the result is a PDF file in whatever directory you specified as the
location to print to.

See http://www.pdfforge.org/.

> -- Gary
______
Dennis

[Gary Welles]

Mark P. Fishman wrote:

> There's always AntiWord (http://www.winfield.demon.nl/), and the folks
> at Softmaker have free viewers for Word and Excel files
> (http://www.officeviewers.com/), based on the code they use for their
> wordprocessor and spreadsheet import filters.

The few .doc/docx files I've received are archives, thus not ye olde .doc
files VDE would read. Softmaker's Office Viewers sound like a good option.
For now converting them to the .pdf format they should sent is enough.

Twenty plus years ago before MS discovered the Internet, I enjoyed the
challenge of Archie searches via email and FTP mail to find file
converters. Now it's a chore knowing that by now people ought to know
better than to use proprietary formats.

> Still, sometimes it's worth annoying the sender.

It's a fund raising appeal to which I'm happy to contribute. Perhaps I'll
apologize for the delay in converting their attachment into something I
could read and save postage by donating in a lesser known Cryptocurrency
<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrencies>.

Dennis suggests:

> The open source Open Office/Libre Office packages should be able to open
> it.

I began drifting away from a word processor to VDE at just the point I
obtained the last CP/M edition of WordStar. By the last DOS release of
SuperCalc, I became convinced dBase was more useful. If I felt the need
for a word processor I'd look at Nota Bene because it's interesting and
"not just like MS Word". In the 80's my Soho computer vendor once told me
WordStar is good and Nota Bene "does it all".

Perhaps if I first replace the NEC Pinwiter P3200 dot matrix printer. I
yet to print from a Windows application. I may or may not be able to get
acceptable output from DOS boxes. The FoxIt .PDF printer driver is my
Windows default and so far so good with the DOS applications. I preview
the .pdf output in FoxIt Reader and email it to myself for laser printing
a the local library at 10 cents a page.

Still no match for the thirty year ago efficiency of MCI Mail, print and
deliver from any ASCII terminal.

-- Gary

[Moy Wong]

The operative phrase using OpenOffice is "should be able to open it."
Generally it works, but one just gets dragged into version-hopping
upgrades just to be able to *read* a "document." When it *doesn't*
work, there may not be *any* legible text showing even after OO opens
the file.

I think it's incumbent on the document creator to choose a
audience-friendly format. Making PDFs for distribution is a fine
idea--until you collide with readers written for older versions the PDF
format.

Someone mentioned Antiword--again, works sometimes, got sick of
continually having to upgrade.

I abandoned MSWord long ago because I objected to a word processor
that makes use of "autoexec macros" (remember macro viruses?).

-m

[Mark P. Fishman]

If you aren't willing to (a) educate and (b) annoy people who think
everyone uses or should use whatever they have, then you have to be
willing to cope with whatever the inconsiderate morons send you. One
approach is just to extract the printable ASCII subset from whatever
file you get, and to hell with the formatting -- Unicode, of course,
throws a monkey wrench into that. Another is simply to ask people to
please send PDF, then have a good laugh when they express astonishment
that you don't want to edit, steal, and pass off their work as your
own... (There's no need for an editable format if you aren't supposed
to edit the file.)

Microsoft has generally offered free viewers for their files; periodic
upgrades needed, of course. Microsoft's definition of "compatible" is
that the file will open without actually crashing, but there are no
assurances that it will look the same (usually the opposite assurance,
in fact). Forced upgrades are their lifeblood.

For various personal reasons, I prefer to use third-party viewers,
especially if the company also makes products that run on
non-Microsoft operating systems. And even though I'm generally both
smart enough to open the file and curmudgeonly enough to request a
less-proprietary format anyway (asking for OpenDocument Text throws a
lot of people), sometimes it's just a case of not wanting to deal with
that particular inconsiderate person that day. I tell THOSE people to
send e-mail without attachments. :)

-- Mark F.

[dmccunney]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Moy Wong <m...@panix.com> wrote:
> The operative phrase using OpenOffice is "should be able to open it."
> Generally it works, but one just gets dragged into version-hopping
> upgrades just to be able to *read* a "document." When it *doesn't*
> work, there may not be *any* legible text showing even after OO opens
> the file.

Current versions of Word use an XML format for storage. OO/LO can
open them. I'd be deeply startled if *no* text appeared. The worst
I'd expect is that you wouldn't see the document exactly as intended.

The bigger issue is whether OO/LO can *create* a document that is
close enough to what Word does. I know an assortment of writers who
use OO/LO Writer to work on manuscripts, but use an actual Word DOCX
file as the submission draft, because that's what the editor expects
to see. Editing and revision is done on the Word document to produce
the final copy that will be published, and the editors rely on Word's
track changes feature in the back and forth with the author. OO/LO
have a change tracking feature, but it's apparently not quite the same
as Word's.

> I think it's incumbent on the document creator to choose a
> audience-friendly format. Making PDFs for distribution is a fine
> idea--until you collide with readers written for older versions the PDF
> format.

Generally speaking, you can get a PDF viewer that will read the
document. There are a plethora of them. Under Windows, while I have
Adobe Reader, I normally use SumatraPDF, which also opens and displays
eBook files in Mobi (Amazon Kindle) and ePub (B&N Nook, Sony Reader,
others) formats. I have an open source PDF viewer on my Palm TX based
on a Palm port of the Linux XPDF library, and there's an Adobe Reader
version for Android on my tablet.

What will tend to differ is whether the PDF will reflow to fit the
screen size (which requires tagging in the PDF and a viewer that
supports the it), and whether embedded JavaScript will be executed.
(By default, it isn't, even in Adobe's Reader. You must specifically
allow it.)

If a user gets a PDF file in a new format their viewer doesn't know
how to open, chances are excellent there's an upgrade to their viewer
that will handle it.

Staying put on what you are used to because you don't like change is
seldom a viable strategy.

> Someone mentioned Antiword--again, works sometimes, got sick of
> continually having to upgrade.
>
> I abandoned MSWord long ago because I objected to a word processor
> that makes use of "autoexec macros" (remember macro viruses?).

While Office still uses VBA as the macro facility, it no longer
auto-executes. You have to give permission for macros to execute
because of possible macro viruses. (I got one of those years back on
a floppy from my then boss. I had fun explaining the facts of
computer life to him.)

> -m
______
Dennis

[Gary Welles]

Mark P. Fishman wrote:

> . . . the folks at Softmaker have free viewers for Word and Excel files

> (http://www.officeviewers.com/), based on the code they use for their
> wordprocessor and spreadsheet import filters.

Doh! Got their TextMaker viewer and can now open .docx/.doc files directly
without offers to buy MS Office. A one click operation as opposed to
sending/retrieving to/from Zamzar.com.

Tks,
-- Gary

[Gary Welles]

On Fri, 16 May 2014 16:15:44 -0400, Moy Wong <m...@panix.com> wrote:

> I think it's incumbent on the document creator to choose a
> audience-friendly format. Making PDFs for distribution is a fine
> idea--until you collide with readers written for older versions the PDF
> format.

While rarely worth the effort unless I'm just showing off, here's an
example of my showing off with a WordStar created .PDF:

http://link.garywelles.com/WS_PDF

Much to my surprise it all went well in one of my Win7 DOS Boxes. I even
suspect I may have more control over the document with WordStar than with
popular Windows "Save as PDF" options.

Credit goes to: Mark Fishman for pointing the way to the Postcript
Language Reference (Red Book), Manfred Jaine for a utility that made
choosing RGB color values easy, and Ben Cohn for recommending Herne Data
Systems who PostScript letterhead I later revised with VDE.

Some details below.

Gary

WordStar printer instruction: (grwltrhd.ps) run

%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%BeginDocument: GRWLTRHD.PS
%%Title: Gary R. Welles letterhead
%%Creator: VDE version 1.96A (23 Nov 2009)
%%CreationDate: December 2, 2009
%%Pages: 1
%%EndComments
%%EndProlog

/inch {72 mul} bind def
/rjust {dup stringwidth pop neg 0 rmoveto} bind def

gsave

% .0073 .0248 .6052 setrgbcolor % WordStar Blue
.0952 .0952 .4444 setrgbcolor % Midnight Blue

0.5 inch 10 inch moveto
2 setlinewidth
7.5 inch 0 rlineto stroke

0.5 inch 706 moveto
/Helvetica findfont 11 scalefont setfont
(PO Box 1) show
<snip>

I strummed the signature graphic with Portable Bitmap Plus (PBMPlus),
DESQview/X Icon Editor, and XV. And, finally with VDE to set the color,
position and convert the image into an imagemask (stencil) so it would
print over text as if signed with a pen.

WordStar printer instruction: (GARYSIG.PS) run

%%BeginDocument: GARYSIG.PS
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Title: GARYSIG.PS
%%Creator: VDE version 1.95 (29 Aug 2007)
%%CreationDate: June 11, 2008
%%Pages: 1
%%EndComments
%%EndProlog

% remember original state
/origstate save def

.3174 .0952 .8095 setrgbcolor

% lower left corner
0 -15 rmoveto
currentpoint translate

%%BeginDocument: GARYBW.EPS
%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-2.0
%%Title: GARYBW.EPS
%%Creator: XV Version 3.00 Rev: 3/30/93 - by John Bradley
%%BoundingBox: 277 366 334 426
%%Pages: 1
<snip>