Hugo Roy hugo@fsfe.org wrote:
I would like to publish that for Document Freedom day and I would like your feedback before as well as your propositions to make it a better text.
When you attach a file to an email, please make sure that your correspondent will be able to read your files correctly. It is a basic principle of courtesy. There is an easy way to make sure it is possible: use open standards. If you do so, your correspondent will have the possibility to choose which program he or she wants.
For many formats my choice is not to install anything and that choice is file format independent.
For example I'm currently not aware of a proper ODF reader I'd want to install on systems I care about, in fact I'm not even aware of something similar to antiword, which mostly works to get the information I care about out of doc files, has a reasonable list of dependencies, doesn't take ages to compile and is easy enough to audit and use.
Organisations and Software supporting Open Standards
* OpenOffice.org * VideoLan, the project making VLC
Given that the page is about email attachments I don't think VLC should be mentioned here.
- ^ Microsoft Office by default save your files in the ".doc" format
... Word ... saves ...
or the ".docx" format. If you share these documents with people using different word processors, it will not be working properly. Good alternatives for Microsoft Word are documents in .RTF or in .ODT (use the "Save As" feature)
Most of the time an even better option is to simply copy and paste the frickin' content into the email directly, as the recipient is unlikely to care about the fancy layout anyway, and if she does, she can always request the source file. It also saves bandwidth and makes discussing the content easier.
Fabian