Are there alternative formats to RTFs or PDFs [closed]

开发者_Python百科 It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, visit the help center. Closed 11 years ago.

We are using RTFs to save some data that we generate. However, our client says that this format has become old and needs a new format to use. So can anybody please suggest a new format which can be used instead of RTFs or PDFs?

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The age of a format is not really an issue unless the applications that use that format no longer support it. For example, HTML is a fairly old format but it is still useful today. However, there are new versions of it so if you were consuming/creating it you should be updating it to the latest version.

In your situation, the client is saying that they do not want to use RTF. The only answer we can give you is to ask the customer for their preferences. The RTF format will be just as usable today as it was a year ago unless the software using it changes. Therefore, either the customer's needs have changed or their preferences have changed. Either way, instead of guessing it would be good to know what their new requirements are.

Based upon your added specifications, you probably want to consider talking to the customer about using ODF (Open Document Format) since this can handle all of your requirements listed so far and because it is an open standard. Here is a link to more information:

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/

You could also go simpler and use HTML documents. This would allow you to ensure that there is a viewer on every machine and it would allow you to move these documents to the web easily (if that is something that might be of benefit).

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LaTeX if it's for human eyes. XML if it's used as input for programs. ODF if you need a WYSWYG editor.

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You could try JSON, XML, HTML, excel and many, many other. What do you need the output for?

And by the way - in PDF you can really format your data however you want and need - even though this also is an old format, it is still suited for any types of read only documents

Edit

You should take a look at BIRT reporting and BIRT output formats. It supports output as HTML, Paginated HTML, PDF, WORD, XLS, and PostScript. It also has an API so you can integrate it with your solution.