Comment on Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools' use of 365 Education suite
Eheran@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoFormatting text/data is about as important as punctuation etc., if not more so.
Comment on Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools' use of 365 Education suite
Eheran@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoFormatting text/data is about as important as punctuation etc., if not more so.
ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
I disagree, if only for the reason that you can’t easily and more importantly reliably convert document formats to plain text. On the other hand, there are plenty of good tools to convert plain text to printable formats (like pr from OpenBSD).
Eheran@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Why is the ability to convert files relevant for the relevance of formatting text? Which is important on paper (pencil) too, which can not be converted to something else.
ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
If my professor wants a double-spaced document with Times New Roman in 12 point font and 1 inch margins, that’s very easy to do with a plain text file as input (They can load a template with all their defaults in their WYSIWYG editor and paste my text in). If I, as a user, want to convert a formatted document back to plain text to read/edit it (which I prefer), this is unreliable, and can lead to malformed output, especially with formats like docx that contain images.