Online Asynchronous Board Meeting Tools?

[Victor Odhner]

Thanks, Brian, for your reply to:
  Re: OT: Copying text from PDF to text on Mac corrupts words containing “t"

(The ligature treatment could explain why only this one poster’s emails have that problem.)

I was producing minutes for an online meeting we had for a Board of Trustees. We would not have been able to get a quorum in time to meet a deadline, and we just had to discuss and approve the sending of a grant request. There were over 100 emails over 37 hours. It worked out well, considering, but of course that’s not the best way.

What I’d really like would be a forum application especially friendly for a meeting involving discussions, motions, seconds and votes, where people can check in asynchronously.

I imagine something like the following:
Chair creates a “Meeting” entry that will collect all discussion.
A fixed list of user names is entered.
Members can pop in and out, over several days.
Each time member joins, a web page is presented displaying all discussion to date for that meeting. Member would scroll to the bottom to proceed.
It can produce a page formatted for printing. That page would look rather like output from a chat. It would be only plain or rich text, *not* be formatted as a table or have structural features that would complicate copying and pasting, because producing the document is an important purpose.
Some sort of timestamps would be nice, but should be unobtrusive.
Does anybody know a forum service that might come close?

I’ve looked at some summary pages for online meeting tools, but they don’t go into much detail, so I’ll have to visit each one.
I might also look at enjin which is really for gamers but that’s not a problem.

Thanks,
Victor
___________

On Jan 9, 2016, at 19:17:50, Brian Cluff <brian at snaptek.com> wrote:

On 01/09/2016 05:26 PM, Victor Odhner wrote:
> Many words containing “ti” or “tt” or some other combinations with
> the letter “t” get corrupted when I use copy and paste, from PDF
> text that looks normal. Some software interprets the PDF correctly
> for display and printing, and some software fails to understand this
> encoding involving the letter “t”.

My best guess would be that they are using some form of font ligature so
that tt, ti and probably ff fi etc etc get transformed into a different
unicode character that doesn't exist in the font that the application
that you are pasting to is using.

> Of course if someone can tell me a better way to save Thunderbird
> messages with headers into a document...

Just right click on the message and select "Save As".  In the lower left
corner change "All Files" to "Text Files", then make sure to change the
file name suffix to .txt and you should get a clean text copy complete
with the headers.

Brian Cluff
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