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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Generating PDFs with Ada
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:32:48 +0100
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Date: 2011-01-11T23:32:48+01:00
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"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) writes on comp.lang.ada:
> Le Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:14:12 +0100, Ludovic Brenta
> <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> a écrit:
>> No, I think we should tell them "tools should generate PDF or
>> OpenDocument, not a proprietary format"; this is true whatever language
>> the tools are written in.
> You could also be more pragmatic and note:
> 1) The amount of MS Windows and MS Applications users is great.
> 2) You are unlikely to convince them all.
> 3) If you convince some, the count of others will still be great.
>
> What about advocating while supporting the actual state of thing ? You
> can do “I am able in some limits to provide support for this and that,
> but be  warned that ... and what about .... and did you ever minded
> that ... ?”

That's exactly the attitude I've had with customers before.  So far I
have always been able to convince them not to use .doc, and therefore
I've never written any tool that generates .doc :)

> Last but not least, anything widely used is near to always end into a
> de-facto standard. There may be planned obsolescence (I hate it as
> much as you do), but older format are still there and being more
> documented over the time.

Whether a standard is "de facto" or "de jure" is irrelevant, the
relevant part is that a standard is not controlled by any single
(dominant) vendor.

> Look at MIDI specification as an example: its not open at all, there
> is no publicly accessible official documentation about it, but as it
> exist since long, it is documented in multiple place in a way which
> make it really usable.

That's because of multiple, independent implementations of the standard,
i.e. the situation is the opposite of that of .doc.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.