Yeah, that’s ironically what Microsoft has been moving towards. Collaborative editing is incredible when used properly. But that also means anyone with edit access can mess up your carefully crafted document. Luckily, things like Comments are becoming more commonplace, so people can suggest edits without actually being able to commit them.

It doesn’t solve the copy/pasting issue, but you can copy/paste from PDFs these days anyways. Realistically, even saving it as an image won’t solve that, since most devices can recognize text in images now.

I’ve given up on trying to find certain books in sane formats. Thankfully Calibre is really good at converting PDFs to actual ebook formats.

There’s a bit of a learning curve, and sometimes I have to do a little semi-automated cleanup – but it works.

Markdown is gaining traction. There’s lots of tools that will edit and display Markdown consistently, and without a dedicated tool, it’s just a very readable text file.

And, most importantly for today, it’s easy to generate a PDF file from, haha.

Djvu, but it’s toolset is proprietary.

TIFF, but the constraints are pretty sever and text must be ocr’d.

You don’t want to get an architectural plan, a marketing brochure, a newsletter, a corporate report, a tax form, or any type of legal contract that way.

If you’re just sending text and don’t need formatting, send it as a txt file. If you need formatting preserved - especially for someone who isnt an expert in your field - you want it formatted properly.

Yes, let’s allow the end user to apply their custom font to their tax documents and employee contracts

Markdown is a bit limited (the spec doesn’t cover common extensions like tables of contents, internal links, and explicit page breaks). AsciiDoc is better on that issue.

The only use case I have for being picky about the formatting/layout of a document is my resume. Some people have a threshold for how long a resume is allowed to be (for example 1 additional page per 10 years of experience). Also, I have all of the dates right justified (for easy skimming) but still on the same line as the job title (to save space on the page).

It’s intentionally fucked by MS. It doesn’t matter that this non-MS software actually follows consistent standards. As long as its only the minority, they get away with it looking like it’s the others not being consistent.

MS has a history of doing it. It’s in the company ethos of “embrace, extend and extinguish”. Imagine something as simple as storing the contents of a document being at the behest of a private company. Humanity is all the worse for it.

Or talks about paedophilia…

“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”

RMS on June 28th, 2003

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "

RMS on June 5th, 2006

"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue. "

RMS on Jan 4th, 2013

That said, when he’s talking about the potential dangers of proprietary software, he’s usually bang on.

We’re just too pedestrian to get it.

If they can’t prevent others from using it, seems fine to me.