Suggestions on reliable format to save files in

I have most of my documents in rtf format. Most of my documents are pretty simple format wise, with the most formatting including underlining, bolding, or a color change. Therefore I kept most of my files in rtf format. Another reason that I did this was so that I could share my files between Windows and Linux if I had to(though things have changed a lot over the years). Just today I lost a lot of information from an important file I had in RTF. This is now the second time that I have lost information from an RTF file. I thought the first time was a fluke, but I am not sure now. I am mad

Basically I want a reliable format to save my files in that will preserve ALL my formatting and so I don't lose ANY information. What do you folks suggest? Is ODT my best option? How does this type of file look in WORD? Even if I can't share the files with Windows it isn't a huge deal, but would be nice, but not a deal breaker. Please help!

 

If you don't need to keep editing the files, PDF is your best bet. If you do have to edit, you can always use ODF, which is open-source and completely accessible, and you can always use Open Office to save it into an office compatible format if you have to open it in Word.

 

Thanks Pitabred. If I need to archive my documents then I will look into PDF, but I need a format where I can edit my documents often. When you say ODF do you mean ODT format , or is there a better format? Is ODT reliable? I really don't want to save my documents in DOC format as I want to distance myself from MS if possible.

 

Open office can read .doc files though. I dont see where the problem is.

 

ODF = Open Document Format. ODT = Open Document, Text. ODS is an Open Document, Spreadsheet, and so on. ODF is kind of an all-encompassing term.

nizzy1115: Yes, OpenOffice does read .doc. But .doc (and all other 2003 and earlier Office formats) are basically just memory dumps of Office that have been reverse engineered, and are not very stable or robust. ODF is a file that has very separated content from presentation, and is just a .zip file that you can recover quite easily, even if part of it is corrupted. The same is not true of Office files. ODF is also an open specification, so there is no reverse-engineering needed to read it. It will always be an open format, so there will never be a case where there won't be a program to read an ODF document, and it will never become obsolete without a very clear, easy upgrade path. ODF is simply much better because it's open and because it's documented. If he needs to use the files with Office, he can just do a Save As.

 

You can try learning LaTeX. Pretty steep learning curve, though, but the documents it produces are beautiful. Basically you write LaTeX like you write HTML markup into a .tex file, and then the LaTeX binary will convert it into a pdf. For archiving purposes, you can upload the tex file somewhere and convert it to pdf on demand. You can even use a version control system (like svn or git) to keep different revisions of the tex source.

I use LaTeX with SVN for all of the documents I produce at school, and the history system has saved my many times.

Though, the simplest solution would be odt.

 

Could you recommend any internet resources for teaching how to use Latex? I am also a university student.

 

For editing LaTeX files, I use Eclipse with the TeXlipse plugin. I believe you will need to install the TeX distribution package on whatever Linux you're using. For Ubuntu, I use the texlive package.

For SVN in Eclipse, I use Subclipse.

To learn how to use LaTeX, check out Wikibooks. Also, you'll need to Google for things a lot of times.

 

You really oughta try OpenOffice. I've got Word, but use OO instead. Never had any problems reading Word documents from within OO, or saving OO documents to Word. I've used OO to write a document, clicked on "File>Save As>Word 97/XP", then e-mailed the document to Word users. Haven't had any complaints.

If you're not using fancy formatting there should be few if any problems.

However, the question of why and how you've been losing files sounds like another matter entirely. Documents shouldn't disappear!

 

Thanks everybody for the truly great responses. You gave me options I would have not thought of.

@PitaBred - I think I am going to convert all my documents to ODT format. That seems like the simplest and best bet for me.

@EateryOfPiza - I had heard of Latex in my UNIX college days but never looked into it. I don't think I will mess with it now. Maybe if I get bored some day but will stay with the simple ODT format. Thanks for the cool suggestion though.

@Telkwa - I do use open office. That is my main Text editor and I use my Linux install 99% of the time and 100% of the time to create documents. I think I might have lost my info because I had colored my text in orange and since formatting was not preserved for some reason, it took the text with it Like I said before I really don't want to save documents in Word(.Doc) format if I can help it. I haven't tried opening an ODT format file in Word, will have to check that out some time.

 

Yeah, I'm avoiding Word too when possible, or saving documents twice, once in .doc and again in .odt.

Also taking every opportunity to encourage friends/family to switch to OO!