On Nov 19, 2003, at 7:12 AM, Derek Neighbors wrote:
>> I get emails from my brother that sometimes contain attachments that
>> are
>> .doc files. Can I execute these files under linux and what app should
>> I
>> use? I am running deb unstable at the moment but am not afraid to
>> compile if what I need is not available using apt.
>
> First you should educate your brother why the .doc format is bad to use
> and why he should use something else. [1] Then you should encourage
> him
> to use rich text format. You can use Open Office or Abiword to open
> RTF
> or DOC files. Open Office is more bloated but is better at doing so.
>
> apt-get install openoffice.org
> or
> apt-get install abiword
>
> You should not have to compile anything.
>
> -Derek
>
> [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
Yesterday MS published the XML-Schema for Word .doc files and granted
everyone a royalty free license to any patents that they may have on
the format. I suspect that they did this precisely because they
realized that they had more to gain by maintaining the .doc format as
the standard for word processing documents than they could get by
keeping it closed.
I consider this a victory for folks like Derek who had the courage to
say "Please resend that .doc attachment in some open format."
(text/plain)