For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.
Pages '13 can't open templates created with Pages '09.
Pages '13 can't copy and paste lists with numbers into plain text.
There's a reason why it has 2 stars on the app store. Somebody seriously dropped the ball at Apple. Office never pulled shit like this. As soon as '14 is out for mac, I'm removing iWork. Caring about design is one thing, caring about design more than the existing work of your users is another.
Adobe’s marketing will tell you otherwise, of course. I used to share an office at Berkeley with Paulo Ney de Souza, who had a wonderful collection of “legacy” pdf files that could no longer be opened in Acrobat that he would trot out for the Adobe sales people when they came by (he was helping to get MSP off the ground at that point).
PDF is probably the best choice for preserving “design”, but I wouldn’t trust it for preserving content any more than any other format. Always keep a plain text copy.
The "spec" is full of statements like "render this the way that it was done in Office 95".
The best solution would be to use ODF, which is supported by all office software.... except Apple's.
I agree, but have a look at PDF/A (A is for Archiv{e|al}): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
> PDF/A is an ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for the digital preservation of electronic documents.
> PDF/A differs from PDF by omitting features ill-suited to long-term archiving, such as font linking (as opposed to font embedding).
Edit: yep.
I've used other PDF viewers (Evince, xpdf, gs, mupdf), and tell you what.. I've come across PDFs they cannot display properly.
If I have to rely on others implementing things for me, and there is concrete evidence that others have trouble doing it, why would I rely on such a format?
Do you also implement your own OS from scratch, or do you rely on others?
Every FOSS OS I know of has patches coming out on near-daily basis.
No, not today. Maybe in the future, who knows.
But I try not to depend on too many things and people, if there's a way around it. I like to have control. That's freedom to me, and freedom gives me peace of mind.
So, no, I don't see why I should waste my precious free time improving software support for a format that I find way overcomplicated and just plain silly. Why should I?
If plain text does the job for you, great. If not, and you come up with something better than PDF, also great. I'll be happy to use it.
Complaining is always a lot easier than doing.
If my mom can't open a pdf in pdf.js, I'm not going to tell her "Well mom, patches welcome."
It's the whole point of FOSS. If it doesn't work for you, fix it.
This criticism is especially off-base given that the OP said he wanted something he could control. Use the source, Luke!
"I'd rather bet on something you can implement all by yourself without needing to wade through a thousand page spec."
pdf.js was obviously outside the bounds of what he said he wanted from the beginning. You stubbornly brought it up anyway, then gave a nasty, clichéd response when he pointed out exactly why it was the wrong answer.
"If it doesn't work for you, fix it" is ridiculous. It's saying "here's this thing that doesn't do what you want, go make it do what you want instead of using these other things that already do what you want".
What system does that statically linked thing run on? Is that system going to remain compatible for decades? Or emulators capable of running an old version of it?
Why overcomplicate matters when you can pick something you know just works.
I'm just not especially concerned. It's not like I get better life out of my paper documents, as I don't worry about the whole acid-free paper in an hermetic container deal.
That's worked out fairly well so far. Stuff I wrote back in the 90s is still readable. Probably not that great if you're a designer, who needs something to look just so when printed. But for near enough everything I do, it's more than sufficient.
Easy to convert too, since it's just tagged text.