How to set up an automatic archive of city council committees' public notices 7173

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 21:08:55 -0500, Chuck F. staggered into the Black Sun and said:

...and formatting like bold, italics, or different fonts is really not possible with plain text, to say nothing of pictures and complex layouts. Most of the MS Word documents I've seen would've been better off as simple HTML files. HTML gives you formatting, more layout flexibility, and images without a problem. (It's also "immediately web ready" if you need a buzzword for clueless manglement types.) MS Word can "save as HTML", and even though it doesn't generate very good HTML, your average web browser can parse it just fine.

Another poster upthread recommended RTF, but he didn't know if RTF could include images. RTF has no problem with images, but it stores images in a pretty inefficient way. If you've got a lot of images in your documents, consider something else.

I think that Chuck has forgotten how most users use computers. Chuck, most users learn how to do things in one program (MS Word here) by rote memorization. They freak out when things change. They don't want to learn things. They want what they type to look pretty. Trying to convince a user who's used to MS Word to use a text editor instead would be an uphill battle.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL