Gidday PM
that's one important one, right there...
here's some others:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jun/21/comment.comment1
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2013/04/docx-vs-doc/
and it's an open standard, which is handy...
Good articles. Thanks, mate.
Interestingly, the second author finishes with:
"
There is no reason to be browbeaten into thinking that there should only be one document format. And I welcome the increases in power, flexibility, openness and choice brought by .docx, even though I have no intention of using it."
LOL! I'm with him. Even though the compatibility pack from MS is bigger than the entirety of Word v5.5 (fully WYSIWYG for DOS), in fact, many times over. I still have Word for DOS v5.5 ...
We still use Office 2003 Pro, with the compatibility pack installed on all the PCs.
I still have the Word User Manual for Office 97, which was a mere 800+ pages long. It's a great program. The Word Basic programming Guide is a similar size, but it appears to have buried itself somewhere. There is no single, downloadable instruction manual for any modern version of Word (or other Office products), to my knowledge. If anyone knows of one, please point me at it ...
The issue/s with image quality when embedded are really simple to overcome. Firstly re-size a large image to the approximate size required in even a terrific freeware program like FastStone Viewer (if there are to be hundreds of images in a single Word file, otherwise, just insert the full size image!). When the document is needed to be "shared" - i.e. usually forwarded to a recipient - print it to a PDF file.
PDF files have the huge advantage of both displaying correctly on all platforms (e.g. all versions of the Apple OS, many of which are incompatible with each other ...; as well as all the different flavours of Unix) and secondly, Acrobat selectively compresses image files at whatever resolution is required, while saving the text as true type fonts.
I like the mention of higher security with .DOCX files. That's why there have been so many security patches for the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack ...
.