Best document file format?

[darrelljon]

What's the best document file format for storing text?
I'm working with various documents I want to distribute for a variety of different reasons.
I know what's best for smaller sizes. I did a topic here a while ago.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=74849
What's best for

• Prospective employers
  Business colleagues
  Ordinary home users

[darrelljon]

Also for
Long term archival preservation purposes
and
proofing OCRs between book scans and ebook generation

[Galbi]

Although I´d like to see ODT as a world standard, i voted for RTF.
For the moment, I think it´s more convenient as there are lot of software that can read and write in that format with free software (free in sense of free and freedom) and no one will complain that can't open it.

For ODT there are good news:
http://www.zdnet.com/uk-makes-odf-its-o ... 000031884/

More and more administrations are making open formats the default standard.

[darrelljon]

Doesn't RTF strip formatting like tables, frames etc.
This might actually be useful for me as I need to do that to OCR scans to turn them into pure text.

[SFR]

What's the best document file format for storing text?

Plain text? If so I vote for TXT [UTF-8].

Long term archival preservation purposes

Why not PDF/A, which is

specialized for the digital preservation of electronic documents.

Greetings!

[Les Kerf]

...Long term archival preservation purposes...

For long-term storage, most DEFINITELY .txt

However, I suspect that a prospective employer will be somewhat annoyed if you present them with a resume' formatted in plain text
Les