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asperous

I'm not an expert on government documents, so I am wondering: what formatting does the Australian Govt need?

Why wouldn't plain text suffice?

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The same formatting any other large organization which creates a variety of documents might need.

Things like tax forms, license applications, instruction manuals, reports, plans, ...

Nobody wants to read or maintain ugly plaintext files. We don't even use plaintext in technical documentation, we use various markup languages, even if it's just ReST or Markdown.

Government archiving rules often mandate use of digital signing. In the US, NARA has rules about what count as "trustworthy records" along these lines.

E.g., see http://www.epa.gov/records1/faqs/rks.htm

OOXML, PDF, and ODF each have a standard "container" and key management model that makes this a whole lot easier than plain text.

Doesn't "plain text" have a standard "container" in the form of MIME that also allows attaching things like signatures in a standard format?

7-bit ascii has been around for a lot longer than these formats which mostly represent a dump of the state of a formatting engine into something like XML in a file tree and compressed with PKZIP.

I was thinking of something like this when I wrote my comment. MIME does function as a container model, but it's not plain text and it could only be a standard with supplementation. But there's a UNIX-y sense in which this is all human-readable text representations.

I'm not really familiar with the internals of ODF, but OOXML, while it does capture quite a lot of UI state, is actually quite clean and represents the intuitive document structure rather well.

Even for long documents with structure, gamefaqs has shown us that plain text can be used effectively there as well.

I would love to see government department information documents with ASCII art headings and Tables of Contents.

Not to mention Org Mode... but there's about a zero chance of emacs being picked up as 'standard'.

Perhaps Emacs could me made to produce ODF.

org-odt-export-to-odt

http://orgmode.org/manual/OpenDocument-Text-export.html#Open...

Perhaps Emacs could X

is nearly always true. Provided X is actually possible.

I'm wondering if it could have something to do with the level of encryption enabled by ODF documents? It's no secret the Australian Gov't has come under sustained hack attacks of late, so maybe this was the catalyst?

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