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Hello Mark,
As can a PDF. The reality is that nothing is totally secure doing it this
way. The thinking is that more people are going to have WORD on their
systems, than are going to have Acrobat.
I think what you mean is that more people will have Word than the
full-blown Acrobat software (the one that can change a PDF). My concern
is that someone will read that paragraph and think that you're saying that
more people can view Word documents than PDF documents, and that's not
true.
There are two HUGE reasons why PDF is a better choice:
a) Word documents can have complete executable programs embedded in them,
and therefore can CONTAIN VIRUSES!
b) Word is ONLY available for Windows and Mac (and Mac compatibility isn't
perfect) so users of other platforms, including Linux which is quickly
becoming a major factor, will not be able to view Word documents. Sure
you can open a Word document with OpenOffice and AbiWord, but they don't
render the document 100% faithfully to the way Word renders it, so the
invoice won't look exactly right. (Though, this continues to get better as
time goes on)
PDF is available for all operating systems and can't contain a virus. So
it's a much better choice!
Another interesting choice is HTML. If appropriate testing is done to make
sure that the document works in both Firefox and IE, an HTML document
should be viewable on any platform, etc.
Perhaps the best suggestion is to write your invoice in XML format and use
a tool to apply a stylesheet to that XML so that it can be converted to
PDF or HTML or Word, etc. Then you can give your customers a choice!
Which would they prefer? or would they prefer the raw XML in order to
have computer program that inputs the data right into their databases?
The best of all worlds.
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