Re: [Bug-gnupedia]Submissions in Word Format

[Tom Chance]

Well that's alright then :-)
And there was a GNU program mentioned a while back
that converts M$ Word into ASCII anyway :)

Tom Chance


--- Christopher Mahan <address@hidden> wrote:
> >From: Tom Chance <address@hidden>
> 
> >The only reason I can see for ever not allowing
> Word
> >files, or any other files created by a company's
> >software, is if they get on our backs about
> converting
> >the file types, or charging us for using them. But
> >until we get into trouble for doing it, we'll have
> to
> >put philisophical dislikes of M$ aside to get as
> many
> >articles into GNE and Nupedia as possible!
> 
> Microsoft cannot claim ownership of the textual
> content of a .doc file.
> 
> The only thing they would complain about would be
> the use of knowledge of 
> their proprietory binary format, which the converter
> would certainly need if 
> it was running on Linux, let's say.
> 
> But, if the converter was using a win 98 or win NT
> machine with MSWord on 
> it, and decompose the document using the Word
> Document Object Model, 
> programmatically, from VB, VBA, or VBScript, then
> the converter would in 
> fact not know the details of the binary .doc file,
> but rather use MSWord's 
> to do that with. And it's never been a problem to
> convert files from MSWord 
> to something else (like ascii) using MSWord.
> 
> Now, depending on the type of files, this may be
> easy or hard, and possibly 
> some formatting might go awry (MSWord formatting I
> think will never truly 
> translate well to the web), but it could be used,
> either as-is if the author 
> doesn't care, or it could be then edited online,
> from the xml (using TEI).
> 
> 
>
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