hi Fabian,
* Fabian Keil freebsd-listen@fabiankeil.de [2010-03-30 19:59:00 +0200]:
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.
For e-mail I use
odt2txt - simple converter from OpenDocument Text to plain text
it works quite well.
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.
What about Ogg Vorbis audio files?
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.
That is a good point. In a lot of cases it is much better to just add the content in the e-mail directly.
Best wishes, Matthias