Wonko the Sane's Journal: Poor choice of words

My uncle is an assistant for a senator in a state legislature. Recently, they enacted a bill requiring government documents to be stored and transmitted in "electronic format."

Unfortunately the state agencies complied by scanning all the paper forms into PDF format. So now, he and his colleges are drafting a new bill and want to clarify that the electronic documents must be capable of being edited. They don't want to specify a particular document format, to prevent getting locked in to a specific technology.

I can't think of the specific term he's looking for, so I'm asking Slashdot. Here's your change to influence the law of a rather large state. What term would describe electronic documents that can have their data manipulated, instead of storing it as a graphical black box?

Look at the GFDL

[Dlugar]

It's a hard thing to specify, but the GFDL has done the best job I've seen:

A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a vari

Re:

[Wonko the Sane]

Thank you. I think that's about as good as I'm ever going to find.

Groklaw

[tqft]

Go over to groklaw and post in the latest off-topic thread there.

Open document formats are a specialty and you will get some good (but probably lots of) advice

Hmm

[Khakionion]

I think the word you're looking for is... ....text.

Re:

[Wonko the Sane]

Not necessarily. Word, Excel, even Power Point. Anything where they can extract the text easily.