Universal text document format?

[Hummer]

Hey all,

I don't know if this question goes in this forum, or whether or not it's a stupid (or obvious) thing to ask...

My question is, aside from the outdated .rtf format, is there any other document format that offers some sort of portability? Right now I've got StarOffice running on both Windows and Linux, but I'm not sure if I'm confortable having all my files encoded as .sdw, but I don't want StarOffice to try to save as .doc (because it's somewhat innaccurate). Plus, I've recently installed Abiword (to check out all the hype) and feel like I'd like to be able to use it as a word processor from time to time. But I don't want half my files as .sdw, half as .abi and the rest as .docs.

So is there any universal format that will allow me to save my files as one format which all my WPs can open?

Hummer

[evulish]

.txt? If you just do plain text docs and no formatting or images, txt files would be fine...Otherwise, I haven't a clue...

[Gnu/Vince]

I'd say a LaTeX file which you convert depending on which machine you're on

[Hummer]

Actually, I need a format that supports at least some formatting. Although I don't use of hell of a lot of spiffy formatting, I do often use footnotes, headers & footers, styles, etc. The problem with these features is that, if saved as an .rtf, different programs often "interperate" them differently.

Although, I just read that Abiword hopes to work with the StarOffice and Koffice team to develop a uniformal file type. Cool.

Hummer