Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Just a blue sky idea here, maybe one of you guys can give me a bright idea.
Our price list is about 11 pages long. It's much more than just a price list, it's a short, comprehensive guide to buying a PC wisely. And, of course, it tells people what a nice company Red Hill is.
At present, I maintain it in my favourite word processing program, which I daresay none of you will have ever heard of - it's a thing called Describe which (like so much of my software) was originally written for OS/2 but has gone cross-platform, so I can run it under Windoze, 'nix, anything I like. The company closed up a few years ago and there are no more updates for it, but that bothers me not at all. It works, it's paid for, I am used to its odd mixture of unusual strengths and weird weaknesses, and don't particularly want to change. But in any case, there is no way on God's green earth that I will disrupt my entire smoothly crafted office software setup - quite a menagerie of different apps - which has evolved over the years into a remarkably efficient system, by changing my primary OS. (So don't bother suggesting Word for Windows or anything else that requires a Microsoft product. Darling, I don't do Microsoft.)
So, here is the current setup. I write the pricelist in Descrbe for OS/2. From there I can do the usual things: print it or fax it. But I can't email it. Sure, I can attach the Describe file to an email easily enough, but who do you know that has a WP program that can read Describe files? Or I can save it as a Word document. Describe is very old now and only writes Word 2.0 format, but who cares? You can read that with any version of Word just fine, and it's no doubt a great deal smaller and more efficient than the current bloatware product can manage. But it's still proprietary, and I don't like proprietary formats. Indeed, I despise proprietary formats.
In my book, there are three acceptable formats for sending text to people, and three formats only: plain text, Java-free HTML, and (at a pinch), PDF Sending proprietary formats is not only rude, it is insecure. Did you know, for example, that the single biggest cause of computer infection at employment agencies is getting a Word macro virus through the resumes that would-be job applicants send in?
I spend my life telling people not to open attachments, especially not ones with .exe .bat or .doc extensions - so how can I honestly say "but you can open my attachment, that's fine"? (In reality, it would be fine, seeing as it's generated by a non-Microsoft WP package on a non-Microsoft operating system, for which, to my knowledge, there has never been a successful virus written - but it sets a bad precedent.) And in any case, not everyone can read Word files either.
So, if I'm going to email the pricelist to people, it needs to be in a genuine open format. PDF I could do at a pinch, but it makes huge files and I don't want to stuff about making PDF files every time I want to email a quote. HTML is the obvious way to go.
I'm at home with HTML and don't see any particular difficulty in making an attractive HTML document to send, and (with a little donkey work on the style sheets) I can make it print nicely too, so I could have just one single HTML document that I can print out for in-person callers and people who want it snail-mailed to them, fax to people who want it via fax, or email for the email queries.
Just one problem: the actual prices. The pricing is just one page, but it is not plain text. It's a hot link to the appropriate parts of my master pricing spreadsheet. I use DDE to hot link the current prices from Quattro Pro .(A rather nifty trick that, seeing as Describe is OS/2 native and Quattro Pro is a Windows app, and they come from different companies, one of them defunct and the other one quite possibly not long for this world - none of this Clippy the Paper Clip Wizzard "do you want me to help you link your Excel into your Word document?" stuff, I had to puzzle it out for myself. But having put the skull sweat in few years ago, I now just open the WP package on whichever computer I happen to be using, and it pastes in the latest prices without me having to do anything bar hit FILE - PRINT.
Now, is it possible to do that with an HTML document? Without tears, blood, or bad language?
I'm sure there are all sorts of fancy you-beaut things that use Delphi or some other hi-tech engine to make on-the-fly web pages, but I don't want to go down that track - it would be a massive overkill. I just want to have an easy way to include some bits of my spreadsheet in the HTML that I email or print.
Java?
Or just tell 'em that I'll put it in the mail or fax it, same as I have been doing for the last ten years?
Our price list is about 11 pages long. It's much more than just a price list, it's a short, comprehensive guide to buying a PC wisely. And, of course, it tells people what a nice company Red Hill is.
At present, I maintain it in my favourite word processing program, which I daresay none of you will have ever heard of - it's a thing called Describe which (like so much of my software) was originally written for OS/2 but has gone cross-platform, so I can run it under Windoze, 'nix, anything I like. The company closed up a few years ago and there are no more updates for it, but that bothers me not at all. It works, it's paid for, I am used to its odd mixture of unusual strengths and weird weaknesses, and don't particularly want to change. But in any case, there is no way on God's green earth that I will disrupt my entire smoothly crafted office software setup - quite a menagerie of different apps - which has evolved over the years into a remarkably efficient system, by changing my primary OS. (So don't bother suggesting Word for Windows or anything else that requires a Microsoft product. Darling, I don't do Microsoft.)So, here is the current setup. I write the pricelist in Descrbe for OS/2. From there I can do the usual things: print it or fax it. But I can't email it. Sure, I can attach the Describe file to an email easily enough, but who do you know that has a WP program that can read Describe files? Or I can save it as a Word document. Describe is very old now and only writes Word 2.0 format, but who cares? You can read that with any version of Word just fine, and it's no doubt a great deal smaller and more efficient than the current bloatware product can manage. But it's still proprietary, and I don't like proprietary formats. Indeed, I despise proprietary formats.
In my book, there are three acceptable formats for sending text to people, and three formats only: plain text, Java-free HTML, and (at a pinch), PDF Sending proprietary formats is not only rude, it is insecure. Did you know, for example, that the single biggest cause of computer infection at employment agencies is getting a Word macro virus through the resumes that would-be job applicants send in?
I spend my life telling people not to open attachments, especially not ones with .exe .bat or .doc extensions - so how can I honestly say "but you can open my attachment, that's fine"? (In reality, it would be fine, seeing as it's generated by a non-Microsoft WP package on a non-Microsoft operating system, for which, to my knowledge, there has never been a successful virus written - but it sets a bad precedent.) And in any case, not everyone can read Word files either.
So, if I'm going to email the pricelist to people, it needs to be in a genuine open format. PDF I could do at a pinch, but it makes huge files and I don't want to stuff about making PDF files every time I want to email a quote. HTML is the obvious way to go.
I'm at home with HTML and don't see any particular difficulty in making an attractive HTML document to send, and (with a little donkey work on the style sheets) I can make it print nicely too, so I could have just one single HTML document that I can print out for in-person callers and people who want it snail-mailed to them, fax to people who want it via fax, or email for the email queries.
Just one problem: the actual prices. The pricing is just one page, but it is not plain text. It's a hot link to the appropriate parts of my master pricing spreadsheet. I use DDE to hot link the current prices from Quattro Pro .(A rather nifty trick that, seeing as Describe is OS/2 native and Quattro Pro is a Windows app, and they come from different companies, one of them defunct and the other one quite possibly not long for this world - none of this Clippy the Paper Clip Wizzard "do you want me to help you link your Excel into your Word document?" stuff, I had to puzzle it out for myself. But having put the skull sweat in few years ago, I now just open the WP package on whichever computer I happen to be using, and it pastes in the latest prices without me having to do anything bar hit FILE - PRINT.
Now, is it possible to do that with an HTML document? Without tears, blood, or bad language?
I'm sure there are all sorts of fancy you-beaut things that use Delphi or some other hi-tech engine to make on-the-fly web pages, but I don't want to go down that track - it would be a massive overkill. I just want to have an easy way to include some bits of my spreadsheet in the HTML that I email or print.
Java?
Or just tell 'em that I'll put it in the mail or fax it, same as I have been doing for the last ten years?