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by firefax·8mo ago·view on hn ↗
I've been doing all my personal notes etc that I want a rich text format in .ODT for decades now and don't regret it one bit.

I do regret being overly paranoid in my 20s and not writing down my master passphrase to my personal documents -- I lost a huge chunk of diaries and writings due to that.

Fun fact: ODT uses Blowfish encryptio. Remember when we made Bruce Schnierer a meme like Chuck Norris? He wrote it -- apparently it's faster than AES?

Anyways, if you save with password in a .ODT file, if you pick a strong password you've got a nice little self contained encrypted volume that doesn't require "suspicious" software to open.

ANYWAYS, a bit of a tangent but... looking forward to death of Word.

1 comments
I'm sure ODT works well for many personal use cases, but can guarantee it will never see adoption in the legal industry. Microsoft Word is the only viable option for lawyers.
>I'm sure ODT works well for many personal use cases, but can guarantee it will never see adoption in the legal industry. Microsoft Word is the only viable option for lawyers.

The legal industry also uses MD5 to certify digital evidence hasn't been tampered with, that too will eventually bite them in the ass.

Indeed, I wish they use TTH
Word has only been around for 40 years or so. Lawyers worked differently before it and they'll work differently after it.

I've seen too many things that seemed to be around forever eventually disappear to believe in the permanence of Word.

> I'm sure ODT works well for many personal use cases, but can guarantee it will never see adoption in the legal industry. Microsoft Word is the only viable option for lawyers.

I'm a lawyer, though I'm practicing in a wholly different legal system (Romanic civil law) and another country. Why would you say that?

No issues against .docx and and Word per se, but I hate that stupid ribbon with undying hatred. Thus I use LibreOffice as much as I can, while maintaining a licensed Office 365 setup under dual boot with Windows for cases when I have no other choice.

I don't think it's too surprising that another country's legal profession would have a different culture than that of the US. When OP says that ODT will never see adoption in the legal industry, I think it's fair to say there was an implied "in the US" there.
Your post comes off as a little patronizing, and still does not answer the question about the "why".
Universal (country-wide) professional adoption, which implicitly requires equivalent display of features that are not often used by the general public.

For a similar reason, faxes will never die out in the US, because the legal industry requires them.

> Universal (country-wide) professional adoption, which implicitly requires equivalent display of features that are not often used by the general public.

That was my hunch, too. Okay, but which features, that only are in Word but not on other products?