Back in 2005 I complained about Apple's pages application launching with no mention of HTML export functionality.
They're at it again, the Apple site says:
Getting the word out.
When it’s time to share Pages documents with friends and colleagues, you can export them as PDF documents, in Word .doc format, as RTF, or as plain text documents. Or send your documents to iWeb for publication on your website as Pages ’08 or PDF documents. (For the former, readers will need a copy of Pages; for the latter, Preview or Adobe Reader.)
Look at that – no mention of HTML. You can put your documents up on the web in PDF or Pages format, like that would be a smart idea. This is the kind of application design that leads to this post from Peter Suber Why do online-only OA journals use PDF? [update: the original post is here] It's because word processors don't ship with proper HTML export, that's why. See my recent adventures trying to write a paper in HTML using standard word processing software.
Oh, and Brian Jones says that iWork ‘08 supports the Open XML formatsonly the page about Pages says that you can import the new OOXML (Word) format, nothing about saving to it, you're stuck with .doc and RTF for that – and I bet it's a lossy export.
People, don't lock your documents up in proprietary paper-lovingformats. Use ICE.
(We're about to start beta testing the online version of ICE, so you won't need to install anything soon, apart from a Word template or an OpenOffice.org extension.)
[Update: fixed a couple of typos]
Comments
comments powered by Disqus