Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."
If they'd been using (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice, would it be news here?
Re:If they'd been using (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Insane!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm Portuguese and I'm really surprised they are using Microsoft tools (Word I guess) for this. The thing gets even more stupid when we think the trial is running since 2004 and when the entire country was expecting the final ruling, the process lagged a while more because of what it seems a Microsoft related glitch. More, (from another TFA http://dn.sapo.pt/inicio/portugal/interior.aspx?content_id=1660098 [dn.sapo.pt]) - they had to call some Microsoft "specialists" hired by the ministry of justice to help with the pro
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typesetting software is over kill for a document whose final form should be a pdf
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Typesetting software is precisely the appropriate level of software for a document whose final form should be pdf. Page Layout software however really is overkill for a document over one page indented to convey information primarily through the actual text.
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How is MS Word page layout software? It's a word processor. Just like OOo. LaTeX is useful if the final form is for printing and layout is absolutely critical (such as magazines, scientific documents with lots of formulas, newspapers, etc.). For legal documents, MS Word or OOo is sufficient.
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By the seems of things... Word is not sufficient.
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By the seems of things Word is overly sufficient. The bloatware has produced bloatwork that renders the result not even unusable, but counter-productive.
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No, a text editor is what should be used here. Typesetting software is for converting the document from text to PDF.
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Uh.. yes, that's what LaTeX is. You edit in any text editor of your choosing, and then run the marked-up, but otherwise completely bog-standard text file through the typesetting engine to produce something you can print, whether that's a PDF, postscript, DVI, or whatever. You can even output HTML if you need to.
Word is the thing that's overkill: it's page layout software. There are too many knobs for general text, and although it includes tools that could make it nearly as useful as text editor + typeset
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Word is TEXT ONLY, for desktop publishing or layouts you need something like scribus or the closed source equivalent. Of course, for text it's the defacto standard, I feel sorry for Word Perfect and Qu
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The fact that word is a crappy page layout engine, and not really suited to the task does not change the fact that it is, primarily, a page layout engine.
Notepad is text only. Wordpad can be text only. Word can export to text, but really isn't "text only" in any sense of the word. Even the text export will be wonky, depending on how it decides to interpret the layout decisions you made.
side note: If wordperfect for dos is what you're looking for, I'd recommend one of the incarnations of Vim or Emacs that
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I'm Portuguese too and I am not surprised at all. A couple of years ago, I was accused of an IT related crime. When I went to be heard by the judge, the first thing she tells me is: "I know nothing of computers, for me they are just typewriters".
Then, under a pile of nerves, I had to explain to her what a server is, the meaning of uploading and downloading files, the difference between a website and a file hosted in a server, among several other basic stuff, dead worried that she would understand something
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Can you even *have* a 2k page Word document without tremendous compute resources?
No trouble at all (Score:2)
Sure. For an average word document, 1k of those pages would be just vertical space. And as everyone knows, professional MS Word users can make blank pages with only about 21 newlines.
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If blank pages are allowed, why would you use 21 newlines, when a single page break would suffice?
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In LaTeX, you can write a three-letter macro to add all those newlines for you. You could even make it support arguments, so you could tell it how many blank pages to add.
Were they using Word? (Score:2)
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Microsoft's fault (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Yes, it's Microsoft's fault that you have to spend 3 or more years in high school learning how to produce a simple document, and another two years or more in college learning how to make more complex documents. Who else would you blame?
Of course I think colleges everywhere should create a MS Word PHD, for those poor users that after 10 years using a computer don't know that caps lock is the cause of their text being all in uppercase.
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This doesn't sound like a "Simple Document" at all. It's over 2000 pages, composed of multiple merged documents, probably hyper-linked internally between documents.
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If they'd been using Open Office (Score:2)
It depends. Does OpenOffice have change tracking and commenting?
What happened here is they forgot to turn off Track Changes and, possibly, forgot to delete comments.
It's what happens when you use a word processor like a mechanical typewriter. The problem is not the tool, it's the organization that failed to train its people.
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No, because it wouldn't have happened.
But, for a long document, Lyx would be better.
Re:If they'd been using (Score:5, Informative)
Correct. If they'd been using OpenOffice.org, they'd have turned off the change tracking feature in disgust after the third time the computer paused for several seconds while making a minor edit and gone back to making a secretary manually merge the documents.
I've never used this feature in MS Office, so I don't know if it's any better, but it's an absolute disaster in OO.o. So bad, in fact, that the last project I was on, they decided to move to LaTeX for the next version because change management is easier and they decided the time spent learning LaTeX would be less than the time wasted with OO.o.
Re:If they'd been using (Score:4, Informative)
What version were you using, and was it with Word or ODF documents?
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Considering how easy it is to use, to cause the issues outlined in the review we are dealing with some mighty incompetent users who have managed to do the
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I find formatting to be no less of a pain in Office. For anything over 20 pages or so, it's worth learning latex. Unfortunately, for the average user, that's not really an option. You have to be a somewhat technical user to get anything out of latex.
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2000 pages... (Score:4, Informative)
But who would ever think of using word to typeset a 2000 page document build from multiple sources. All my experiences with MS Word tell me that this is going to be a nightmare how ever you try to do it and what ever the content of the document is.
Re:2000 pages... (Score:5, Informative)
Work Perfect had it about right and this is part of the reason why those who operate in the legal community stayed with Word Perfect for as long as they could. Formatting in legal documents simply must be precise. Work Perfect allowed "low level" editing of formats to prevent that from happening.
On an almost regular basis, I have MS Word users dealing with company documents working with a particular template who, for inexplicable reasons end up with an extra page in the document so that a 5 page document says "page 5 of 6" in the header. For whatever reason, though, when the blank page gets removed, the formatting disappears with it and the whole template formatting is destroyed.
One might argue "the template is wrong" or that the user is doing it wrong somehow. Either of these may be true, but the fact is, they are unable to correct the errors just by looking at them because strange and unexpected things happen when different things are inserted and deleted.
In any case, Word Perfect has historically manages Word Perfect documents of all sizes without much trouble.
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I'd gladly mod you up if I had points. I did once what you describe, merging various sources from many authors using almost all flavours of word between them into a single document for publishing. It was a nightmare. The only way I managed to do it in the end was with openoffice.org. And I still had hours of fun quashing encoding variations between word for windows and word for mac, like quotation marks being straight on windows and angled on mac, which is terribly difficult to spot on screen but shows like
Re:2000 pages... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's "Hang, draw, and quarter". They would "hang" you but not drop you as they do in modern times, so your neck would not break, and presumably you would still be somewhat alive after hanging. Then they would "draw" you - take you down, and then they would tie each limb to a horse, and have the horses pull you apart. That's the "quarter" part. Sometimes they would cut the sinews in your hips and shoulders to make it easier for the horses to pull you apart.
Somewhat akin to working with word, but less painful.
Re:2000 pages... (Score:4, Informative)
No, no - it's even nicer than that.
Hang - As you say, hanged by the neck until loss of consciousness but still alive.
Draw - Then they'd wake you back up by cutting into your abdomen and pulling out your intestines. Occasionally, for added fun, they'd burn them in front of you on an open brazier.
Quarter - As you say, pulled apart by 4 strong cart horses.
Lovely people.
Look up 'broken on the wheel' for truly awful torture.
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I believe he was referring to the much more more ancient and noble tradition, whereby inquisitors would take a number 2 hard leaded pencil, and make a few quick sketches to scare you. Generally these would include yourself being hung, and given quarters.
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Hehe... Neither is it mine. I just know a bit of medieval history from being a dungeon master back in my D&D days.... (And I did leave out the "disembowel and emasculate" part of "draw"....)
Will this affect the deadline for appeal? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the important question here is not whether Word or OpenOffice was used.
The important question is:
Will this affect the deadline for appeal?
Not having adequate time to read the full verdict before deciding whether to appeal or not would in my eyes be a serious justice problem.
It's a conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's a conspiracy (Score:4, Funny)
for some reason, gis on pedobear and clippy comes out with this:
http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/msft-clippy.jpg [pulse2.com]
sfw
Re:It's a conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Clippy: I see that you are writing a ruling. Would you like me to show you the EULA where we already own your ruling through Microsoft's substantial control of the legal system?
Microsoft WORD? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I was surprised when I heard this was related to Microsoft Word. Don't most lawyers use Wordperfect?
No, they use IBM GML, aka "Bookmaster" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language [wikipedia.org]
Re:Microsoft WORD? (Score:4, Informative)
He's right about that. Legal offices are the last holdouts on Word Perfect. The formatting is quite precise and predictable. Legal office workers are quite adept at editing with WP's "show codes" mode to ensure than everything is formatted exactly and correctly. While I believe it is true that MS Word also offers a feature like this, I'm not sure that people actually use it... or know how to for that matter.
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To show codes in Word 2007, use OOXML. (Score:2)
To my knowledge, the "show codes" feature is [WordPerfect] only. No equivalent thing in Word except for
...saving your document in Office 2007 format, opening the document as a zipfile, and seeing the OOXML files.
Re:To show codes in Word 2007, use OOXML. (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for that tip. Only slightly less painful than using a hex editor. Or poking your eyes out.
Office automation at it's finest.
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I dislike and don't use Office '07 for unrelated reasons, but that doesn't sound like a feature so much as a side-effect...
You might be able to extract the formatting by using other programs (in this case anything that'll read a zip file) but Word itself won't give you access to it.
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You might be able to extract the formatting by using other programs (in this case anything that'll read a zip file) but Word itself won't give you access to it.
Word itself can't even display the characters in your document; only Windows and Mac OS X can do that. Both also come with zipfile tools.
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I used 'show codes' in MS Word 97 (the leanest and cleanest IMHO). It was there, specially when I had a weekly report to make. Fields such as @date and @time for instance (I can't recall the character so I am using @ for now). Later on I found that I could define my own fields, such as case number for tracking purposes. 'Show codes' could then be toggled off so they come out in English, so to speak. I even added a custom button on my toolbar. That and macros were easier then, before they decided you need
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Your memory is indeed bad. "Show Fields (Alt F9)" bears no relation to WP's "Show Codes". WP's show codes was there because their WYSIWYG wasn't all that good.
Show Fields shows you the references to document properties and custom fields you or a template maker have created, assuming that you've put them to work with the "Insert Field" menu.
There is no Word function, and hasn't been since Word 4.2 for DOS, that will show you where formatting starts and ends other than the text itself.
If you want to know what
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That's because Word doesn't use markup for its internal representation. There's no markup to show. A Word document is managed as a collection of styled objects.
It's a lot closer to XML than it is to WordPerfect or its uncle nscript.
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Sadly, that's a feature which quietly disappeared. I found the mark-up information useful at times, but now, yeah... at least in OpenOffice (don't use MS at home) the most I can get is showing non-printing characters.
Word processing has actually come a long way since Word Perfect was king. Perhaps if "show codes" existed in today's word processors, some of the formatting code would be quite confusing and difficult to look at.
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He's right about that. Legal offices are the last holdouts on Word Perfect. The formatting is quite precise and predictable. Legal office workers are quite adept at editing with WP's "show codes" mode to ensure than everything is formatted exactly and correctly. While I believe it is true that MS Word also offers a feature like this, I'm not sure that people actually use it... or know how to for that matter.
Try again. Legal offices are stuck on WordPerfect because it's cheap and their users are entrenched. Legal assistants aren't like typical clerical staff. Their training and expertise is in legal paperwork, not computer operation. New staff get taught what they're supposed to use and old staff are resistant to change.
I do IT for a number of law offices. By and large they've got the oldest hardware, oldest software, and least inclination to update anything anywhere.
Okay, that's not fair. I've got tool
Gross oversimplification (Score:5, Informative)
Putting this on Slashdot without giving more the info on this case (which would have very hard) is prone to disaster.
This has been the longest running case in Portuguese justice and has been full of stupid decision since day one. When this whole thing blew up (6 years ago or so) a few of the key people on the process were arrested and put in jail while the investigation was going. The theory was that there was the danger they would flee the country. Some were left there for the maximum time they can be arrested before a trial, while others after several months in jail were released and no charges were made against them (so maybe they shouldn't have been put in jail in the first place). From the ones that were put in jail and later released, none fled the country. So the first decision on this process was already a mess and a good start for the entire thing.
The trial was huge and went on for 6 years,the longest even in Portugal. There were 900 witnesses, 7 lawyers for the defendants and also the prosecutors. Since every one of these lawyers and the prosecutors has the right to talk to the witnesses this leads to about 7000 cross-interrogations. Whatever can be taken from 900 people and not summarized by 50 or 100 people (remember, this is a case about child-abuse, not country-wide rigging of elections or whatever) is still to be understood.
The victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all. They couldn't be precise on dates on when things happened, on places where things happened, on people present. It gets to the point of one supposed places where the abuses happened is described not by the exact address but by "an apartment with an odd door number on street [whatever]" (in Portugal buildings on one side of the street have odd numbers, on the other side even, so in practice they were just able to say we enter a building on this side of the street). One guy is accused of abusing a boy but the time span is described as "on the second trimester of year XXXX". I wonder how many of us could provide a solid alibi spanning 3 months... I'm not trying to defend no one here, but there were, but as far as we get to know, there was no clear solid evidence to anything. There aren't even phone calls between the abusers and the supposed ring leaders or anyone involved. People abuse other people for years and no phone call is ever made to set up any meetings and so on.
Now going to the decision itself, it was supposed to be read in June, later postponed to July due to lack of time to write it and then to September (there are "judicial holidays" in August in Portugal) as they still had no time to finish it. When the day of presenting it finally came, they attorneys were not given the decision by the judges, as it still had to be finalized. All sentences in Portugal are presented to the defendant when the paperwork is already on the Ministery of Justice system and can be accessed right away (to start preparing for appeals and so on). Not this one, because it was too big, with 2000 pages, and it had still to be finalized. The date of presenting the decision was Sep 3, the date of finally having the paper work was then said to be the Sep 8. That day came and things were postponed one day because there was a problem with the making of the PDF due to the size of the document. Next day it was postponed again to the 10th and it was a problem with the printer, generically described as a "computer problem", common nowadays when things go south. Friday by the middle of the afternoon the news came out everything will be finished by Monday. And yesterday there was this piece in the same newspaper as presented above:
Delay due to virus [publico.pt] (Only in Portuguese, google translate should be as good as before)
So the reason has been changing with time and the most likely reason is the judges' inability to finish the thing on time (not wanting to go into the lack of skills vs lack of t
Re:Gross oversimplification (Score:5, Funny)
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;Sounds like the OJ Simpson case. Basically a case of an inept judge who was more into publicity than justice. There is no reason that a simple murder trial need take a year.
I'm not quite sure why a 2000 page decision is needed in a trial of this kind, either. The most serious constitutional questions in any democratic court get settled in a dozen pages or so. This case just sounds like it is a straightforward issue of facts.
If the defendants were placed in prison this entire time, then they probably ha
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I'm not quite sure why a 2000 page decision is needed in a trial of this kind, either.
There are probably hundreds of people involved; some of them need to be exonerated, other will be guilty of something... it's not too much to ask for 20 pages of plain text to jail someone for 10 years.
Besides, the judge can't just say "guilty" and be done with it. He needs to explain *why* the accused is guilty. For that he may need quotes from the law and from other cases (if precedents are relevant in .pt.) Also co
Re:Gross oversimplification (Score:5, Informative)
Your report of this whole mess is terribly uninformed and one-sided. Let me add a few details which are fundamental to understanding this case:
For example, you claimed that the reason behind placing the key suspects in preventative jail terms was to prevent them fleeing the country. What you opted to omit was the fact that there was the impending danger that if they remained free they would try their best to tamper with the investigation, either by tampering witnesses, destroying evidence and conspire with the remaining criminal network to corrupt and derail the judicial process. That's the reason behind the decision to lock them out while the investigation was ongoing. Yet, even though the judges ordered the arrest of the main suspects, they still managed to tamper with the investigation. One example was how Inês Serra Lopes, a journalist which also happened to be the daughter of an attorney defending the main suspect, was caught planting evidence exonerating her father's client [diario.iol.pt].
Then, that which you describe as "the victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all" is a deceitful description of the whole process. I'll point it out to you that this was a child abuse case, where the suspects were charged with the crimes of sexually abusing children between the age of 10 and 14 years old. There were over 30 reported victims, all of which were proven to have been sexually molested through multiple forensic tests. Then, what you describe as "failed to offer clear evidence" was small nit-picking details such as asking a then 10 year old boy the exact day, hour and minute he was sexually abused by suspect X, something which happened over 10 years ago. Besides that, although there were 30 victims and the suspects were accused of committing hundreds of crimes, only a hand full were considered to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to which it also contributed the fact that one suspect confessed to the crimes and implicated all the other suspects, something which you conveniently omitted.
Your post has far more deceitful or simply uninformed bits but I believe these facts I've pointed out are enough to get a clear picture of the case.
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Thank you for this, the gp post did not "smell" right. If you put someone in jail because they might flee the country, release them, and they don't flee, it's more likely that they feel safer having been let go than to assume they would not have left in the first place. The circumstances have changed, in other words, so it doesn't show the original decision was invalid.
And holding someone that maximum amount of time until charges have to be filed then releasing them sounds perfectly legal. Not very suspe
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Except, you haven't actually pointed out any significant facts - just handwaving, accusations, and hysteria. You've grossly oversimplified as bad as the OP, just in the opposite direction.
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Please do point out what facts you believe are insignificant and do point out what you perceive to be hand-waving. Thankfully, this case has been extensively documented so that it is quite easy to access any information to defuse any disinformation attempt.
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Wel, some witness came to public saying they were offered money to disappear - did jail prevent that?
I don't understand what you mean by that.
Nobody is questioning if the crimes actually happened - it was proven beyond doubt they happened. The big question is - did they happened when the testimonies say they happened, and with the people they accused? I don't know why, but I doubt it.
If the victims, who were proven to be honest, accuse the suspects, if the reports are coherent with the facts and if even fellow suspects, who confessed to the crimes, also implicates the other suspects of being directly and deeply involved in that child abuse network then what else is it needed to clear any doubt that the suspects systematically raped small children?
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It's pretty simple.In the "Farfalha" case in Açores, the whole deal was solved in half a year...Not big-shot lawyers, no public figures, justice was swift and hard. Pedos in jail, life goes on.
In this case, we know all too well what is going on. For instance, if Carlos Cruz is innocent, why is he warning that he'll reveal the list of ALL suspects by the end of the month?
You have to ask Carlos Cruz himself. All I can do is speculate. Yet, why would a member of a criminal gang who was singled out as a fall guy revolted against the remaining members who did nothing to help him? You know, just like Bibi did with a long list of arguidos, including Paulo Pedroso. Once Bibi realized that he was being singled out and being set up by his fellow pedophile pals as the sole pedofile he started confessing about everyone and everything, which ultimately landed convictions for the rema
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Yes, I can only be Carlos Cruz to make such a statement...
Well, you did posted a terribly myopic, misinformed, one-sided report of the case, omitting a long list of facts which are fundamental to understand why that criminal gang was found guilty.
I made a minor comment about Paulo Pedroso, which spent sometime in jail to later on be released and no charges made against him.
Yes, no thanks to the intervention of Portugal's government with actions such as changing Portugal's penal process to help out their fellow party member.
And what about Gertrude Nunes, the owner of the house in Elvas where supposedly orgies were happening left and right. She was innocent after all.
You are wrong. Gertrude Nunes was found guilty of providing her house to be used in child abuse orgies [visao.pt] but they also stated that there weren't enough evidences to prove
I RTFA and (Score:2, Funny)
Please don't hold back from trashing Word. I hate very few things in life, but Word - as trivial a piece of crap as it may be, it is raises my hackles really intensely and I'm enjoying this potential Word trash fest too much let it go
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Export to PDF (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a Guess (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly (Score:3)
This is exactly the reason I always advice students to write their thesis in Latex, rather than Microsoft Word. Latex does a better job of typesetting, and is what many people I talk to will end up having to use for journal submissions anyway, but the real kicker is that you don't want the whole thing to blow up and make your document unusable when you're almost done. I've never seen thin happen with Latex. I've seen it happen all too often with Microsoft Word.
Good luck to these unfortunate fellows in their attempts to get the document in a usable state again. I hope this also prompts a reconsideration of the technology choices. Perhaps Latex isn't the best choice for them, or perhaps it is, or perhaps Latex plus some front end will yield a good solution. Or perhaps Microsoft Word will turn out to be the best choice, after all. But there are several options to consider, and now seems a good time to start doing so.
copy/paste ftw (Score:3, Informative)
Pick any format-aware application that doesn't handle Microsoft's bloat and paste those 2000 pages. Problem solved!
The solution (Score:3, Informative)
In most situations, when you can't get rid of unwanted text that's sticky in word, do : CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+N, CTRL+V
Then keep on editing as usual.
(and I'm not even kidding)
Re:The solution (Score:4, Funny)
That's funny, I thought it was UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A.
No wonder nothing happened. I'll try your sequence later today.
A bad workman always blames his tools (Score:2)
It's not a glitch in MS Word. Word is doing what it's supposed to do. The people using Word messed up, from what I can tell from the translation.
Blaming Microsoft for this glitch is like blaming Google for the fact that the lawyers probably could have Googled for instructions for how to remove the extra info, but didn't.
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"The people using Word messed up..."
Yes. By using MS Word in the first place. I don't know if they were ignorant, naive, clueless or stupid or some combination of all of them but I cannot fathom what made them think that using Word for a 2000 page document was a good idea. I made the mistake of using it for a paper a fraction of the size rather than learn latex. I'd swear it has a random formatting generator built in.
WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" would solve this... (Score:3, Insightful)
To this day, I don't know why Microsoft hasn't added WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature to Word to help resolve this... I cringe whenever I have to merge documents from different sources, especially if they're from different versions (e.g. 97-03
In one example of a 10-page merged document, I deleted a group of bullets and the text moved 1/2 way to the right & the font changed, became bold, and was blue. But it wasn't a simple fix of moving the tab stops, changing the font, etc.--it wouldn't let me do some of those things. That document was so screwed up that I had to cut/paste everything into Notepad and spent 3 hours reformatting it from scratch.
I mean nobody is moving TO WordPerfect from Word, so Corel should want to get some $$$ from Microsoft to license the technology (e.g. due to copyrights, patents)... But then again, Microsoft might be scared to reveal how screwed up the formatting is within
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If you're going to merge documents from multiple sources, it helps not to do it in the stupidest possible way.
Start by reading each source and saving them all in the same format/version. This is as simple as Open... SaveAs...
If you have duelling styles, resolve them in a single .dot you'll use for the result and resolve the conflicts. That's what the Styles and Formatting dialog is for. That assumes that you have a clue about using styles.
You can't expect Word to make aesthetic decisions for you, or to reso
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This takes a specialist? (Score:3, Informative)
Select All.
Copy.
Open Notepad.
Paste.
Select All.
Copy.
Open a new Word doc.
Paste.
Save.
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Yes, Paste Special has saved me lots of formatting clusterfucks in both Word and Excel.
If automated tasks do not work... (Score:2, Informative)
Then do it the old way!
Copy & Paste people! Make a new TXT document, then open each word doc, select all, copy, then paste into the new one in the proper order! Formatting is now removed. Either stick with that, select all and copy the TXT file and paste it in a fresh Word DOC.
Poof now you magically have a single document that has ALL the other documents merged into it.
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Why use a word processor, even Open Office or whatever, for ANYTHING? Text is much more reliable in plain text form. Formatting can be added in much better ways, independent of the content. Especially in legal cases, why thrust your textual data to such fragile, unreliable, locked in systems??
How can I spend hours obsessing over fonts, colors and trying to get my pie charts and org graphs to display nicely with such a thing?
Pardon me, I need to send an email to the entire organization because someone left a file open on their machine that I need to work on. What an idiot!
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My vote is that all official documents must be typed in vi(m), or at worst emacs. Even if somebody did manage to use DOS line endings, a few simple keypresses would fix it.
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Huzzah for vi!
I agree - though as I recall, from, lo, many many years gone by, WordPerfect was a pretty nice little program.
One problem: vi doesn't handle footnotes well, so maybe HTML would be appropriate here. It can still be done within vi, and HTML can handle graphics, too.
On the other hand, vi wouldn't handle Portuguese characters so well. Make them all switch to English!
Line endings (Score:3, Insightful)
With plain text, I'm sure someone could manage to mix up DOS and unix line endings
That's why Python has "universal newlines": so that the code units representing newline on MS-DOS (0D 0A) and pre-2002 Mac OS (0D) get translated to UNIX newlines (0A) within the standard library. If you're willing to ignore pre-2002 Mac OS, you can just strip 0D from all files and end up with consistency among PC operating systems. The trouble starts when you bring in text files from VMS and some other operating systems not descended from UNIX or PC operating systems. Unlike text files on UNIX, MS-DOS, and
Re: (Score:2)
I like python too, but I'm pretty sure the standard C library has been doing like this for decades, with the text-mode open(, "r") etc. [as opposed to the binary mode, open(, "rb") etc.].
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an unalterable form such as [...] PDFs
what
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Minus the shit; javascript, forms, multimedia, etc.. pdfs are a more or less reasonable document format for exchange. Certainly better than microsoft documents which you can't even count on looking the same across computers, and PS files tend to get massive.
Of course, I tend to think that everyone should just be using latex already, but like that is ever going to happen...
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Of course, I tend to think that everyone should just be using latex already, but like that is ever going to happen...
Not everyone is into your fetishes.
Re:What is wrong with these people? (Score:5, Informative)
PDF alterability (Score:2)
To clarify this point: Read TF PDF spec. The format was designed from the start to be alterable.
And to clarify oldmac31310's point, I'll give two reasons why PDF is not commonly seen as "alterable".
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PDF's aren't "plain text" any more (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on the creator of the PDF, though. I wanted to code a quick and dirty web app for customizing business cards, so I remembered that it was just like you said, and all I had to do is open up the InDesign layouts, replace the name with $name$, the address with $address$ and so on and export a PDF X/3 for printing. I'd then have the user input the values and just search and replace the variable names with the values entered.
Only that the resulting PDF contained none of my field names. It was a PDF which
Re: (Score:2)
Why not just turn off "Track Changes", turn on "Show Markup" to make sure it worked, and save the file?