Most commonly used and preferred files for electronic data exchange are:
Open Source of any
kind
.dwg, .dxf, .jpeg, .pdf
MS-Office files
For more details please see below or
contact us
By Manuel M T Chakravarty: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak
Adapted and modified for
MBM
There are a couple of reasons why we should think twice before sending
email attachments in proprietary formats:
About “Proprietary” vs. Free Software
Abstract from Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Exclusive
legal rights to software by a proprietor are not required for software
to be proprietary, since public domain software and software under a
permissive license can become proprietary software by distributing
compiled versions of the program without making the source code
available. Proprietary software's restrictions make it an antonym of
free software. For free software, the same laws used by proprietary
software are used to preserve the freedoms to use, copy and modify the
software. Proprietary software includes freeware and shareware. It can
be commercial software, but public domain and all other free software
can also be sold for a price and be used for commercial purposes.
According
to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), proprietary software is any
software that does not meet its definitions of free software or
semi-free software. The term's literal legal meaning covers software
that has an owner who exercises control over what users can do with it.
FSF's GNU General Public License asserts that the restrictions of free
software offer computer users freedom while the restrictions of other
software benefit only the owner and are unethical.
About Safety
It
is very easy to spread computer viruses with todays overly complex
document formats. You may think that your computer is free of viruses,
but consider that by sending documents to others, you implicitly invite
them to do the same. Do you know whether their computer is virus-free?
You
may inadvertently transmit some of your own secrets. Many users don't
realize that many proprietary documents contain all kinds of
information that is not displayed when you view it. This includes text
of earlier revisions, which you may believe that you deleted, but which
is still saved and transmitted as part of a document. This text may be
recovered by recipients of a document and may prove to be rather
embarrassing.
Furthermore your secrets will spread allover the
world since mails passes many gateways, servers, sniffers and filters
by different organizations as governments, private institutions,
authorities and other data collectors. Your mail remains either as a
carbon copy, filtered of contents or whatsoever for a period of time.
About Files Sizes
Many
proprietary document formats are bloated. Have you ever had a look at
how much memory your average document consumes? Not too bad given
todays hard disk sizes you may think, but consider what happens if you
send an email with such a document as an attachment to a list of
recipients or even a mailing list. The email, including the attachment,
is copied multiple times and if many of the recipients are hosted on
the same mail server, the message can put a significant strain on the
system.
About Interoperability
Users of alternative
software cannot read your attachments. Proprietary document formats are
kept secret by the companies developing them, in an attempt to reduce
competition, and thus, choice for the end user. As a consequence, users
of alternative software will not be able to read your attachments. In
particular, a growing number of computer users rely on alternative
operating systems (e.g., current estimates put the number of Linux
users at 18 million), which put a strong emphasis on international
standards and often reject formats that stifle competition and
interoperability; these systems are becomes more and more popular for
many government, universities, computing schools, companies and private
users.
About Hardware Dependent Formats
Hardware
dependent file formats such as printing file formats can't usually be
opened or implies to buy specific and often expensive viewer
software. There are currently 7 different known formats ESC, ESC/P2,
HPGL, HPGL/2, PCL, PPD and PRN.
About Forcing Others Into An Upgrade Cycle
You
may use a newer version of some proprietary software than some of the
recipients of your message. Some software vendors make sure to change
the document formats with every version in an attempt to force any
person that you communicate with to purchase the updated version, too.
About File Names
Filenames
depends on the local settings of your computer. A file name created in
one language might not be readable in another language. Such files have
to be renamed by the recipient and confusion in later correspondence is
likely to occur.
What is the Alternative?
There
are open standards that ( http://www.openstandards.net/ ) provide an
excellent alternative to proprietary document formats.
MBM relies on:
open standards: http://www.openstandards.net/
open source definitions: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd/
whenever possible open source software: http://www.gnu.org/
Plain ASCII text:
Unless
you need special formatting, good old plain ASCII text is your friend.
It can't carry viruses, is space efficient and everybody can read it.
ASCII is not only good for plain text, any decent spreadsheet
can
read and write tables in tab-delimited ASCII format.
HTML:
The
HTML format used in web pages has been standardized by an international
standardization organization. If you avoid inline code, such as
JavaScript, ASPX, HTML (itself) doesn't carry viruses, it is reasonably
compact, and can be read on virtually any platform.
RTF:
In
cases, where it is necessary for two parties to edit the same document
(as opposed to exchange documents for the sole purpose of viewing and
printing the documents), the RTF format seems to be the only half-way
portable option for WYSIWIG word processors. However, proprietary
software use their own file-format, compatibility is often limited.
DWG, DWF, DXF:
Most
any CAD-Application support both import and export of DWG, DWF, DXF
formats but often forces one of the recipients to upgrade its
CAD-Application. This can be easily prevented by just save the
CAD-Files in backward compatible version.
PostScript and PDF:
If
you need high quality formatted documents, you may have to resort to
either PostScript or PDF. Both formats are well enough standardized to
have broad support on most computing platforms. Unfortunately, they do
carry a (very much reduced) risk for viruses and can lead to rather
large documents, too. A definite plus of these formats over the
proprietary format is that they much more reliably lead to consistent
high quality printouts on systems that are configured different to
yours. They can also be used to display slides, such as those created
by proprietary software. Unfortunately, the portability of PDF
documents is sometimes insufficient and documents cannot be displayed
by all PDF previewers. Tip, always embed your fonts into your PDF
documents.
File Names:
Use ASCII characters only like
[a-z], [A-Z], [0-9] and “_” (underline) and prevent
use of
your local language characters.
Always include either a date or
an issue number to prevent both, human confusion and unwanted file
replacements. Always write dates in form [YYYYMMDD] without
“.” (dots) and without dashes or use issue
numbering e.g.
[My_Document_to_MBM_v01.pdf] or [My_Document_to_MBM_20071101.pdf].
File Extensions:
Always leave the file extension unchanged except if you know what you
do.
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