levien.zonnetjes.net

Although it has hardly received any media attention here amongst the hype of the European Soccer Championships, just over a week ago the FAO organised a big conference on World Food Security. As I had some trouble concentrating on my research report last Friday, I went clicking through the FAO press releases.

As almost anyone will know, the de facto "standard" document format for the last decade or so has been the MS Word Document, or .doc file. Every week I receive dozens of .doc and .xls files per e-mail. And every now and then I try to convince people to store their documents in a different file format, usually without much success. So what's wrong with using .doc files anyway?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a chapter on Enzyme Kinetics for a first-year Biochemistry reader. Because the text contains a lot of formulas, I would normally have used LaTeX. But the problem is that the Structural Biology group who organise the Biochemistry course have to be able to edit the document, and they only use Microsoft Word for Mac. I work mostly on Ubuntu Linux these days, and although I still have a laptop that can run Windows, I neither use nor have a running version of MS Word.

Coming to you live from the Chaos Communication Camp 2007, in Finowfurt, Germany.
I gave a talk entitled "Life & Complexity" here on Thursday. Some supporting material regarding this talk is available on this site.