File format question

[Marcus]

What do people consider the best file format to preserve mainly textual documents in? They do have a few images, screen captures and a fair bit of formatting in them though.

The collection is in .mht format; I do find that when I'm offline I can't always open some of them. this file format seems always to open my web browser every time. The thing is at times I want to read my documents offline and I'm afraid of corrupting them if they keep failing to open.

At the moment they all appear to be okay; they're a collection of technical, semi-technical and newbie reading some of which has been provided by people here and I really don't want to lose them.

...toying with the idea of converting them into .pdf..don't know if that's a good idea or not.

I don't have Word or Office installed on this computer but I do have a full retail box copy of Microsoft Office standard 2007 (a personal purchase) that I can put on if needed. It's brand new and never been used.

[YoKenny1]

I use WordPad that saves them as .docx for Office Open XML Document or Rich Text Format .rtf :

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Using-WordPad

Why convert them to pdfs unless you do not want others to modify them easily?

[PedroHin]

I am delivering my reply from the perspective of 10 years from now. What will I be able to open -vs- what will I have to search endlessly online for a viewer / editor.

I am a big fan of Office 2000 Word documents. I can open them with any later version of MS-Office, OpenOffice, WordPerfect, and even sometimes Wordpad -- but the latter heavily depends on the format of the embedded images.

PDF is best if you don't want to edit them anymore. I like the WYSIWYG prining aspect of PDF, and feel confident that any PDFs I have acquired over the years can be opened and printed years from now.

The Unix community used to be big fans of PostScript format, because you can even feed the document right to a postscript printer without opening it in an application. The problem here is that the PS format never got a strong foothold in the general user community, so there were rarely any good & widely available PS editors / viewers unless you looked around hard for them.

Rich Text Format -- RTF is Microsoft's answer to PDF / PostScript. It was a means of storing font type / size / color in what they hoped would be a universally open format. You could even tweak certain elements of the document using a plain text editor if you are familiar with the coding.

The benefits of PS and RTF are that they are not internally compressed in their native format - meaning that if you opened the documents with a plain text editor like notepad, you could still get to the text inside (but not the pictures without a 7 bit to 8 bit decoder). The drawback here is that they always make larger files. Storage is cheap, but a large document with many screen grabs might still be too big to email in some cases.

You mentioned MHT format, and that depends on a web browser to view. What if you want to print it. Can you control the printer output like you can with PDF or DOC?

Personally, I keep most of my documents in Word 2000 format, because I know that there are many applications that will respect the paragraph, outline, bulleting, and numbered lists. Most importantly, I feel confident that I will be able to open them with whatever the popular document editing application of the day will be.

I suppose the same could be said for OpenOffice, but be careful as their default file format is not MS-Office format (that default CAN be changed to MS-Office formats in the user preferences). I often like to capture web pages into Word documents for storage by

[Marcus]

If I install Word 2007 will I be able to re-save those MHTs as .doc documents (using Word and changing its default format from .docx to .doc)?

Or do I have to re-download and then save the file?

[PedroHin]

If I install Word 2007 will I be able to re-save those MHTs as .doc documents (using Word and changing its default format from .docx to .doc)?

Or do I have to re-download and then save the file?

If Word 2007 can open MHT, it should be able to save in any other format that Word supports without the need to revisit the original web page again.

[AdvancedSetup]

1. You need to keep more than one copy of any file that is important. File corruption or hardware failure can result in total loss of any such document.

2. You need to keep a copy of the installation program (see item 1 above as well) along with the installation key.

3. If a special font was used you need to keep copies of those fonts (see item 1 above as well)

4. If you used a special printer layout that may be lost depending on how it was stored.

I'm not sure what your needs are but I do have documents that go back to 1996 and they open just fine in Office 2007

[greyowl]

I use PDF Factory to product excellent, small documents. The size is smaller than Word and the quality is perfect. A companion application is Fine Print that can me used with PDF Factory to remove graphics from webpages.

[AdvancedSetup]

Then you cannot edit it in the future either and I can pretty much promise you that conversion formatting will be off if it's anything more than basic formatting if you have to try and convert it later on to another format this is editable, or purchase a full version of Adobe or other product at the time capable of doing edits. I like PDF but I'd much rather have the native application that created the document if I had my choice.

PDF is good for what it is, but being stuck with basically an image file would not be my recommendation.

[exile360]

For web pages I just use MHT, and if using Firefox you can get a plugin that allows viewing them with it as well.

MHT is an offline format, although it does open through your web browser, it requires no internet connection to be viewed.

[AdvancedSetup]

The issue though is will it be available and will it work 10 years from now? MHT I doubt it as it's often considered a security issue.

As you can see, it's not really an easy question to answer as there is no single good answer for everyone and every document.

[exile360]

True enough. For wepages, if only wishing to read them, then something like NirSoft's Web Site Screenshot could do the trick, but this leaves no room for links to other pages, something that MHT offers (although the links must lead to live sites).

[Marcus]

Thank you, people, for your input and words of wisdom.

I'm going to put Office 2007 on this computer and when I've recovered from that I shall follow AdvancedSetup's recommendations in Post #6, especially No1.

Funny thing is I normally keep copies of install files and registration keys (I have those written down too); why I'm not in the habit of doing this for all sorts of other documents I just don't know. Never too late I suppose to learn good back up habits.

"!!...thinking...doc & rtf?...doc & mht?...rtf & mht?...doc & mht & rtf?... :)...strong coffee and hot buttered toast?... :)

[AdvancedSetup]

I have about 165GB of software backed up on 3 different drives. Main and 2 externals just in case. I also have 2 Blu-rey disks of software I consider very important as additional backups.

Includes software and keys. I have an additional 20GB of Adobe Software that I recently found that I could not just use them as expanded files and they do require actual image files so now I'll have to back them up in that format so that I can recreate a disk on the fly as needed for reinstalls.

[Marcus]

I have about 165GB of software backed up on 3 different drives. Main and 2 externals just in case. I also have 2 Blu-rey disks of software I consider very important as additional backups.

Advanced, do you do normal copying of your software / data or do you have your drives partitioned with your stuff sorted as you like in those partitions and then do partition / drive imaging?

Or do you use both techniques as you feel it appropriate? I'm not being nosey I just want to know how an expert does it.

[exile360]

I believe what he meant by image for the Adobe software in question was an ISO of the CD or DVD media that the software originally came on. I often do the same for games and other software that I've purchased.

[AdvancedSetup]

Exile is correct.