On 22-Sep-99 David M Rea wrote:
> Guess people put them in Word because they want to retain a formatting
> - otherwise they'd just paste in their email message.
>
> Can I suggest you get AppleWorks on your laptop PC? - it'll translate
> almost anything
> ----------
>> From: "Robert Munday" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: "Evidence Based Health" <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Word documents
>> Date: Wed, Sep 15, 1999, 8:35 pm
>>
>> Is it possible for list members to send attachments as 'Text' or 'Rich
>> Text Files' as I (and maybe other members) do not have 'Word'. Living
>> remote and with no phone I have to plug my laptop to a distant
>> payphone with expensive rates. Its frustrating to watch emails taking
>> a long time to down load squiggles and squares of what might have been
>> good info.
That may or may not be a feasible solution for Robert Munday. However, it
does not address the general problem.
As far as I'm concerned, consenting adults can privately email each other
anything they like.
But it's a different situation in sending mail to a mailing list which
is subscribed to by people who use all sorts of systems.
You should NEVER assume that everyone can read anything other than
plain text (most universally US ASCII but, generally, plain text in
ASCII or ISO-Latin1 encoding).
In particular, the many people using variants of UNIX are not natively
equipped AT ALL to handle attachments which are in any proprietary file
format such as MS Word. In some cases they have software which can
interpret these; in some other cases they can transmit the file to
another machine running MS Windows and read it there; in the very many
remaining cases they cannot handle the file.
Assuming that the whole world uses MS Windows and/or Word is simply
wrong.
It is a most unusual text document which cannot be sent in plain text
in the above sense.
Even if you have it formatted in your word processor, you should still
be able to "cut&paste" into the mailer, and spend a little effort
tidying up the formatting.
In most cases, however, it is straightforward to save the Word file
as ASCII text (which will retain most of the basic formatting), and
pull that ASCII file up into your mail message.
Not doing either of these, i.e. sending it as an attachment because
you already have it in Word format and can attach it quickly and
easily and you cannot be bothered to take the little extra trouble
to make it universally readable, is lazy and also inconsiderate to
the many "non-Word-enabled" readers of the list (quotes denote
irony).
It is also especially inconsiderate to readers such as Robert Munday for
whom bytes cost money. A message such as this one, in plain text, would
probably weigh in at about 3K bytes. In Word, it will be at least 15K in
the first instance (checked it!); and, if it has been edited several
times in "fast save" regime, it may be many times this size (I have
encountered "bloat factors" of the order of 250, e.g a file of 500Kbytes
whose useful content was a single page of text with about 2000
characters).
Not nice.
Thanks for reading this far,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 22-Sep-99 Time: 11:27:06
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