🚀 go-pugleaf

In <0105011F.aj1u88@dragon.enigami.mv.com> cory@enigami.mv.com (Cory Kempf) writes:

>>It's been said before - I'll say it again. Not everyone has a choice. In the
>>business world, or even on college campuses, it may be next to impossible
>>to shirk the standard. If you only use your own Mac and never share, fine. But
>>Nisus isn't exactly common (or MacWrite II or Taste or whatever) if you do 
>>otherwise.

>Nisus and MacWrite II both support XTND.  Most products can read and
>write Word format files.  What is the problem?  

>To put it another way, you have a Mac.  You use a word processor.
>You accept as input Word files, and you output word files.

>Without examining the hard disk, what word processor is being used?

This is an over-simplification. For simple documents, yes translating with
XTND is fine, but many formatting features will not always translate
properly. Let's see you take a 50 page report in Word that uses styles,
automatic T.O.C., multiple columns, tables (via the Insert Tables
feature), headers, footers, footnotes, text-wrapped graphics,
keep-lines-together, keep with next paragraph, etc. and try to translate
it to Nisus or MacWrite II and then back to Word. You will lose a lot of
formatting whether you use XTND or MacLink Plus. This translates into a
lost of lost time and, of course, a lot of lost money for many users.

And yes, there are a lot of Word users that can and do use all those
features. Until there is a universal word processing file format,
exchanging documents between users of different word processors is going
to remain a frustrating endeavour. Sure, for the occasional exchange, XTND
is fine, but for day to day back and forth editing, it's not acceptable.