Re: Germany looking to end reliance on US tech giant

You may be. Most of us have moved on several times since then.

The 68000 provided that shortly after the 1960's.

Then RISC processors became popular, multi-processing became ubiquitous and local area networks became part of everybody's environment. Where have you been for the last fifty years?

I have never submitted a document in Word, I do all my work in Claris Works and then just export it in RTF. If the recipient happens to use Word, then they read it in Word.

As long as the interchange standards are ageeed and adhered to, it shouldn't matter what software the sender and receiver use. Microsoft deliberately screwed this up in an attempt to force users to buy their products for 'compatibility' with their new (de-facto and constantly-changing) standards - and Apple soon jumped on the same bandwaggon.

Everyone's using webforms for ages and PDF is increasingly used for read-only applications. Many FOSS applications work with proprietary formats and vice versa. There's nothing stopping proprietary software vendors from adopting open formats and that would be a positive change.

Governments have no power anywhere near tech companies to influence what people use, on the contrary they're forced to use what people already have to make sure they *interoperate* with the people. First they're behind the innovation curve, now they're influencing tech usage. First they're dictators now they're an annoying party.

There is no "sanctioned format". You read the situation wrong, give it up already.

In my experience, only pdf has proven durable over the decades.

But avoid present-day Adobe software.

Joe

It wasn't totally arbitrary. They were already using / as delimiter for adding parameters to a command line.

John

Unfortunately not. Microsoft Word generates files with the .PDF extension which are not true PDF files. They can be read by other Microsoft programs but not by some of the other systems (working cross-platform was the whole purpoose of PDF files).

Then you do the work yourself.

You have to learn to count angled brackets.

Yes, but there are many PDF readers, some quite tolerant. On MacOS, Preview is pretty good. I don't know the Win options all that well, but there must be some good ones. So try a few and see what works.

Joe

The point about PDFs is that they are standardised and work cross-platform. My reader has worked perfectly well for 20 years but now some recent files called "PDF" cannot be read. I should not have to cast around for readers that can cope with non-standard files that aren't what they are supposed to be, the files should be compatible or they shouldn't be called PDFs.

That ship sailed aeons ago.

Joe

I have not seen this. Are there samples to try?

Newsletters for local groups are often generated in Word, these seem to be the worst offenders. Unfortunately the ones I know about are distributed privately, so I can't give a link to them. In any case, you wouldn't realise they aren't cross-platform if you use a Microsoft product to check them.

There shouldn't be a range of portability; the PDF concept is that it is completely portable, not selectively portable.

Something like a newsletter, that is being distributed to dozens of different reading devices, should be in the lowest common deniominator. I know at least two local clubs whose newsletter is generated in Word and is sent out with pages that are unreadable because some gimmick or other has been incorporated "to enhance the user experience". The senders weren't even aware that the 'feature' was turned on and haven't found a way of disabling it. (I have already resigned from one club because they discontinued their printed newsletter and their online one wasn't readable.)

Why do you single out Russia as an example? The most typical example is USA and most egregiously Israel.

Groetjes Albert

Hear! Hear!

If we hadn't broken our agreement to defend Ukraine, Russia wouldn't be invading now.

Maybe your reader is too old? PDF standard has several versions and IIRC latest one is less than 20 years old. At some moment Adobe decided to add a bunch of new features, documents using them are not going to work on older readers (there were rumors that new features were to make it harder to create competing tools). AFAICS most .pdf-s on the web are compatible with old standards, so will work with old viewers.

I have my own .pdf-reading software and testing it I have found files using strange but legal features, but no case of incompatibility with standards. Note some features were underspecified in earlier standards and made legal later, so one could argue that documents were malformed according to version they claimed to comply with. But I saw no such things recently. I have also seen corrupted documents, apparently due to wrong end of line handling. .pdf files are supposed to be transmited in binary mode, but file that I received looked like they went trough text convertion.

I was trying to think of some major tek event that originated in europe, something on the magnitude of transistors, ICs, computer languages, things like that.

European innovations tend to peter out, or get Americanized.

Some cultural/economic thing going on, I guess.

Airbus is doing good.