what's a good document type?

[mellowtigger]

I need a kind of document that can be edited on any computer platform without someone having to pay for programs to install.  It needs to work without someone having to lower security settings on their pc.  It needs to allow a person to enter data within specific fields in the document.  It needs to be small enough that people can easily email it as a file attachment.

What is there?

I find that Microsoft Word just isn't generic enough.  We put documents out on the web, and some people cannot view/edit/save Word format.  Or miscellaneous Microsoft formats come in to us that require additional software installed to convert to our current version.

I find that PDF is just plain awful.  The Adobe editor is expensive and a cpu hog.  Documents don't always work correctly, even with Adobe Reader.  I do like Foxit as a generic pdf viewer, but it's impossible to get every program to play correctly with a pdf document that expects fields to be filled in.

I find that Tiddlywiki is a security risk because it requires users to alter their security settings so that the program can save data to its own source file.  Prime virus territory.  Yuck.  Too bad, since I really like the concept of it: an editor embedded within the document itself.

So what options are there?  Flat html provides the forms, the dropdown lists, the radio buttons, etc, but it cannot save the data anywhere.  Argh!  Business has needed a solution to this problem for decades.  Why don't we have one yet?

Comments

[ohbrett.livejournal.com]

This may not work for your needs but I have found Google Docs to be helpful with collecting data. You can build a spreadsheet that has a public input page with forms, radio buttons, drop downs, etc... that you can direct people to fill out and it saves what they input into the Google spreadsheet. I believe it's private, but like I said may not be quite right for what you need. Just an idea.

[foeclan.livejournal.com]

.doc (Word 97/2000) is the de facto standard. Even without Office installed, Windows comes with WordPad which will handle it. Any Linux distro worth downloading has half a dozen applications that can read .doc. Fairly certain that OS X can even read it without Office.

There is OpenOffice, which is huge and bloated but free. It will, of course, save its files by default in its own format that can only be read by OpenOffice, so it's a worse option than .doc (which it can read and write if you specify that).

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Because Adobe and Word are never going to stop trying to own the field. Industry has no incentive to stop making you buy multiple softwares, and updates for each as often as the MBAs determine they can get away with.

In short the answer is that there is no one format that does everything you list here.

Have you looked at Open Office?
http://openconcept.ca/openoffice

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Other than the already-mentioned OpenOffice I don't know of any free alternatives for Linux or OS X, but for dealing with .doc files on Windows, there's Jarte (http://www.jarte.com/). It's free and small, though the user interface can be quirky.

iWork's Pages on OS X is reputed to be able to deal with .doc files, but that's commercial software.

I've never worked with Google Docs, but that sounds like an option worth exploring.

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

You're asking the wrong questions. What are you trying to achieve? Not the computer stuff, but the real world stuff?

I struggled with similar problems, and in the end I used ASCII .txt files.

PDF sucks, because while PDF is an open standard, the Adobe Acrobat Reader won't play well with PDFs generated with non-Adobe products. (They'll display fine, and you can even enter data in fields, but you can't save the updated PDF file. Fuck you, Adobe.)

Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) is a great free and open-source replacement for MicroBloat Office (I've been using it exclusively for four years now and have never looked back), but all of your users would have to download and install it.

Google Docs, AFAIK, would either require all of your users to have a Google account, or would have you manually adding access for everyone. And wouldn't provide any privacy for users.

MoinMoin (http://moinmo.in/) is a good wiki that supports an acceptable WYSIWYG editor, but even then, IME, non-geeky people really don't want to go there. And it doesn't support buttons or drop-downs or anything like that. (See my MoinMoin wiki at: SabMagFAQ.org (http://wiki.sabmagfaq.org/). Actually, I built a more impressive one for the place where I used to work, but it's behind their firewall.)

There's a free version of Oracle, Oracle Express (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html), that also lets you build web forms. But I never could get the technical hang of it--you may be able to.

Hell, I think you just came up with a great idea for a start-up. A website that let's people build simple forms, so that users can submit information to them. The site would just generate ASCII files and email them to you, for you to parse however you want. (Encrypt things along the way, obviously.)

EDIT:
Google Docs may be more useful than I thought: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87809

Ooo, and this: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=141062

If you'd like to embed your form in a website or blog, after you create and save your form, click the More actions drop-down menu at the top of the form, select the Embed option, and paste the URL into your site or blog.

[dangerdhotrod.livejournal.com]

yep, doc for editable things and pdf for things that you want other people to download and print out/read but not edit.

there's open source editors that can save/edit/open the .doc format.

but i'd start using google docs if you want to have collaboration. it works pretty well, and it's all html based so it should be available to most people, unless you have no internet at home like me. :(