[plug] LaTeX -> Word converter?

[Nick Bannon]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 12:00:28PM +0800, Christian wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 11:17:07AM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
>  
> > Write back and tell them that you are extermely reluctant to ship information
> > around in a format that is:
> > 
> > * Well known for leaking legally sensitive and priviledged information such as
> > past or tentative revisions, passwords, and other information not visible on a
> > printout;
> 
> Getting off-topic a little here but this is, arguably, not a fault with
> the application but rather with the operating system.  My understanding
[...]

Arguably's right. <grin> Yes, some OS'es can and do zero things out when
allocating memory and extending files on disk. That slows down the
allocation, though, so many systems make the perfectly reasonable
assumption that if you're requesting space, it's because you're about to
put something in it, not leave it untouched. ::-)

I believe the problem comes down to Word's .DOC files being less a
well-defined file format and more a dump of Word's in-memory OLE
structures. Nice and fast, perhaps, but it means that it has no place
as an interchange format.

So... Word ends up saving data that has nothing to do with the current
document (other documents, and older versions of the same one, not just
anything leaked to it by the OS), taking up space, and not re-parsing
it at load time. (so a corrupt document can crash Word, not simply
refuse to load)

I guess the people who made this decision had never had this pointed
out to them, because it seems to me like a killer reason not to touch
Word with a bargepole and stick with formatted text, if you can't find
anything better! (You _can_ find better things, but it's important to
to notice when the pretty WYSIWYG frills are getting in the way of
actual use and realise that you can still give them up...)

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal