| Fred Stluka via plug on 22 Jan 2021 07:40:34 -0800 |
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| Re: [PLUG] Is there a better alternative LATEX? |
Yeah, I have my resume in HTML also: - http://bristle.com/~fred/resume.htm Same for all of my other docs: Resume, invoices, design docs, etc. Back in 1996, when I first did that, it was the only way to link from my resume to other docs, like architecture diagrams from projects I'd worked on, recommendations from my peers, etc. Also, it ensured that everyone could read my resume, even if they didn't have a specific word processor or viewer installed. Formatting options in HTML were sufficient, even way back then, and are unlimited now via CSS, JS, etc. And people can view it on any computer, tablet, phone, etc. Here's a longer rationale, and discussion of proprietary vs open formats, including why to use open formats for docs, email storage, backups, etc. From a message I sent to a friend and ex-colleague a while back. Enjoy!
I also have to watch out for old proprietary file formats. Having a file is no good if you no longer have a working copy of the software to open it. Because the vendor changed formats. Or your license expired. Or they stopped making it. Or you moved from Windows to Mac or Linux and it doesn't run there. How would I go about today opening an Interleaf document from my SPC days? That's why I tried to never use Interleaf, and just saved files as ASCII text instead. But at least Interleaf files were really stored as text with textual markup commands embedded among the words. So I can still open them in a text editor and make some sense of them. Just like I can still open my old VAX Runoff docs from 1982, since they were just text and markup (like HTML of today). No such luck with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Those files are truly binary, so they're useless in a text editor. Fortunately, for now they're still popular enough that lots of other tools can read and write them: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, etc. But that won't always be true. 10 or 20 years from now, any old DOC, XLS, or PPT files I still have will be useless. So, for the past 25 years or so, I've tried to use HTML for all of my documents, invoices, resume, etc. Instead of DOC or PPT files. HTML will take a long time to go away because it's the format of the entire worldwide Internet of computers that run Windows, macOS, Linux, and all other operating systems. Also, like Interleaf, Runoff, and others, it's a textual format with embedded textual markup. Not a binary format. Same for email. VAX Mail, Unix mail, Internet mail, Thunderbird, and every other other email system I've ever used (except for MS Outlook), store mail messages as plain text in a structured format. Outlook is the only one that stores them in a binary file format that is complete gibberish when you open it in a text editor. So of course I avoid Outlook like the plague. That and the fact that Outlook is the single least secure, most easily hacked program in the world. Even better, all the mail programs that store messages as text (except VAX Mail which I stopped using in 1987) use the EXACT SAME text format -- the Unix "mbox" format. So, I don't even have to open my old mail messages from 30+ years ago in a text editor and scan past the structured headers and such to find the message subject, bodies, To/From, dates, etc. Instead, I can just open them in Thunderbird as though they were emails I received today. Can also search, sort, filter, forward, etc. Nice! Some files don't make sense as plain text though. For example, pictures, sound, and video. I'm not sure what to suggest about them. I'm not sure I'd be able to open a Windows BMP, WAV or WMV file anymore. I haven't owned a Windows box since Windows 2000. I never moved to Windows XP, never mind Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, etc. Instead, I moved to Mac and Linux, which are both versions of Unix. Does Windows still support those file formats for images, sound and video? It seems like the world moved on to JPG, TIFF, GIF and PNG files for images. And to MPEG, MPEG-2, MP3 and MP4 for sound and video. So even if I still have old image/sound/video files on my hard drive or other accessible media, I may not have a program to open/play them. Fortunately, I don't have any such files that predate the relatively modern formats. And those formats are used all over the Web on millions of Web pages, so they'll probably be supported for a long time. And will have conversion programs that map them to newer future formats for even longer. Probably good enough for my lifetime. But I have no illusions that future generations will be able to open any of my old image/sound/video files after I'm gone. Oh well, no such thing as immortality, I guess.... The last trap I have to avoid is proprietary backup file formats. Some backup programs (especially on Windows) take all the files you want to backup, and stuff them into a proprietary binary format. So you can only recover an old file from a backup archive if you still have a working copy of the backup software. No luck if the vendor changed formats. Or your license expired. Or they stopped making it. Or you moved from Windows to Mac or Linux and it doesn't run there. All the same problems again! I got burned by that once, when I was at a company that used Windows. The easiest and supposedly "best" way to copy a large set of files to a set of multiple floppy disks (the only media that we had for Windows in 1994) was to use the native DOS "backup" command. My boss was flying to a client site to give a demo of our software, so he asked me to back it up to a set of floppies, knowing that the same DOS backup command could be used at the client site to read the floppies and recreate the files. Unfortunately, the client was running a newer version of Windows, with a newer version of the DOS "backup" command, and the newer version was not compatible with the older version. So, he was unable to give the demo and flew home unhappy. Yes, you read that right. The "backup" command was what people were encouraged to use to make copies of all their files. It was common practice to use it to backup all of your files from an old computer onto a set of floppies, and restore them onto your new computer whenever you got one. And to restore old versions of files from the past whenever a file was accidentally deleted, corrupted, incorrectly edited, etc. But Microsoft changed the file format!!!! So, no one was ever able to restore any of their old files any more. Insane! Personally, I've always preferred to backup files with a simple copy command (like DOS copy or xcopy, or Unix cp, rcp, scp, rsync, etc, or drag/drop in GUI interfaces like Windows, Mac, and X-Windows). Then the backup file is identical to the original file, not stuffed into some proprietary binary format. I don't have to worry about backup tools going away because I don't use one. I just use regular copy commands. So I never lose access to my backup files. Even better, I can treat the backup files like any other files. I can view them, edit them, search them, sort them, copy them, print them, etc., using all the regular tools that I used for all of my normal files. Make sense?
--Fred ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fred Stluka -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service! Open Source: Without walls and fences, we need no Windows or Gates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On 1/21/21 11:13 PM, JP Vossen via plug wrote:
On 1/17/21 5:21 PM, Charlie Li via plug wrote:JP Vossen via plug wrote:Food for thought: `.odt` files (or even `.docx` files) are really just zip files containing XML and other stuff. The XML part is *not* as human readable as any of the wiki markups we've talked about, but you can puzzle it out, it *is* revision controllable and it produces at least somewhat useful diffs. You'd have to build a quick wrapper to pull the XML out then commit both XML and zip, but...you could. It's not ideal, but it's a lot better than "binary files differ."Flat XMLs can be opened and saved directly from the word processor; no (re-)packing formalities needed. For the OpenDocument format, the file extension is .fodt.On 1/21/21 7:38 PM, Eric Riese via plug wrote:I was looking at a LATEX based workflow for maintaining my resume. I ultimately decided against it because it wasn't worth learning LATEX just for that and there wasn't a good answer to generating a .docx when necessary. What I ended up with is that I use LibreOffice. But I save to a .fodt format. That stands for flat ODT, meaning it's a single XML file, not zipped. It behaves passably in git. Every save contains many more changes than just what I intended, but at least it's something. I also have a Makefile that builds .docx and Hybrid PDFs (that's a PDF with an embedded ODT copy so it's edittable in LibreOffice at least) from the .fodt and uploads it to my web server. Feels much better than clumsily sftp'ing it and then sshing in, moving the files and changing the permissions every time. Just like what JP was suggesting, I was actually planning on putting the zipping and unzipping in the Makefile before I found the .fodt format.I never noticed that one before. Cool. It's a tad ugly, but then it's XML so that's redundant. And it's certainly more "plain text."I used to have my resume in Word, way back when. At some point I re-did it in plan old hand-crafted HTML, and that's been good enough since [1]. I'm not sure what I'd do now, probably try Asciidoc or some related wiki markup...or fall back to HTML.[1] https://www.jpsdomain.org/jp/Vossen_Resume.html Later, JP -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/___________________________________________________________________________Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.orgAnnouncements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announceGeneral Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug