I would quite like to recommend Pages, but as long as it involves telling people to buy first a new computer, then a new OS, and in many cases a new screen, none of which they need, all they need being simple DTP, then I will have to find them a more reasonable, which in this case means non-Apple, alternative. Filemaker is a great success precisely because they started delivering it for Windows. The one case where Apple broke out of this crazed circle was with Filemaker. If you are iWorks, you want to support as few file formats and as badly as you can get away with – to give people an incentive to standardize on you. Something similar happens with file formats. The Mac division is always trying to make people buy Macs to run among other things iWorks, so they positively don’t want it to run on anything else. The iWorks product line wants to port to Windows right away and sell as many copies as possible on the other 98% of the world’s computers. The filemaker issue arises due to the tension between what would be good for the application division, and what may be thought good for the computer division, if we notionally think of iWorks and Mac in that light. However, one should remember that it takes a while to develop a program like pages, and that when they started ODF probably wasn’t as known as it is now. It might be a great app, and it is sad that they chose the path of a closed file format. I haven’t tried iWork, but I agree that using it’s own file format is limiting factor for collaboration. It worked great, even though we had a fairly advanced document (e.g. doc to be able to collaborate with my partner. I personally prefer to work in LaTeX, but I wrote my bachelors thesis in business economics in OO.o using. If you wan’t to use an open format, go for ODF, if you want to reach as many people as possible (and maintain editability) use. Even microsofts own programs can’t preserve the formatting on some RTF documents. RTF is a poorly documented format, and should not be used for collaboration if you wish to preserve formatting. When writing a document for others to edit, I think rtf is the best way.
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