20190819-standard_filetypes.txt
So today I was running through my digital archives and of course, as a
student, I had a lot of .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, etc. office files. I
remember that for "compatibility" I would always save in the non x
format.
How wasteful was my youth before I realized that vim and other text
editors like Notepad could do the same thing? Honestly the Powerpoints
are probably the most worthless: I think maybe once I embedded music
or something, but very rarely did it need to be anything more than a
PDF. That gets me (although back then PDFs seemed to be less
write-able than PPTs). I've converted a lot of them to plain text
files. I could/should write some sort of script to do it
automatically, but I'm too lazy to look it up *shrug*. I do remember
having to save my projects as RTFs because Macs and Windows machines
still didn't like talking to each other and everything sucked with the
education system teaching us MS Office instead of awesome stuff like
vim or IDEs. Can you tell I'm a minimalist yet?
I used to support the Windows standard: It works on 90% of computers,
it should be the way. But man, how I love plain text files in how
portable they are (outside of stupid restricted ebook readers...) and
how small they usually are. Sometimes my epubs are smaller than my txt
files, and with that I blame compression, although using Calibre's
ebook editor just shows me how much fat code even Calibre creates
(again, I'm a minimalist so multiple fonts and sizes more than 2-3
just annoy me). I still adhere to the filename.type standard (I think
it's a good one) and I have a shell script that, depending on your
option, can organize your files in a directory based on abc or file
extension. I'm pretty sure it's made me more efficient. Anyway, I just
wanted to lament on the bloated standards for "normal" use:
office-encoded documents that really have no business being that way.
I think .txt and .pdf should be the standards for any sort of report
(tab-separated values for the tables), with .epub a primary for
ebooks.
Don't even get me started on video files... that's a story for another
day.
