I found this article on MSNBC that deals with conversion of RTF to different word processors. While this may not be of interest to most people, it’s pretty interesting to me…I deal with this stuff at work every day. The program I use at work, HotDocs, creates legal documents in most word processors, and I have to make sure the documents my team makes convert to every other word processor. It kinda sucks, because we develop in Word Perfect 5.2 to make sure the documents will convert to other word processors, but to learn why things don’t convert was pretty cool.
On an unrelated note (or work-related note, rather), I read an article that explains how Colorado courts are accepting electronic filing of court documents. This is really cool for me. HotDocs allows users to download forms, fill them out, then upload their answers to a cgi script to be parsed. I’ve been toying around with the idea of actually creating a perl script that will parse the answers and put them in html format or email them somewhere, but I’ve never actually done it (neither has anyone else that I know of). This might be an opportunity for me to do it and get some worth out of it. I’m sure electronic filings are the type of things my job will deal with in the near future, and it would help to learn about it before anyone else does. 🙂 Story here.
Proabably none of y’all care about this stuff, but it’s what I do, so of course I’m gonna talk about it. 🙂