I used MSWord exclusively until the viruses started running rampant and switched to RTF & plain TXT (ASCII). Later dropped both in favor of TXT UTF-8 standard encoding and PDF/A. UTF-8 preserves characer encoding such as thouse weird characters like the umlaut, accents, and non-latin characters. Textpad or Notepad++ are the best editors, imo.
PDF/A compliant (/A stands for archive) is an ISO standard for the permanent archiving of formatted documents and should be readable for longer than more conventional PDF formats. PDF/A differs from PDF where PDF/A files are self-contained which elminates the common problem with garbled layout and missing characters. Data I know I'm not going to edit or very rarely I save into PDF/A files.
The long-term readability of the PDF/A format is achieved by dispensing with certain functions and embedding all fonts in the file. A PDF/A file is recognizable by the blue bar in Adobe Reader. By default it will open as READ ONLY until you enable editing.
IMAGES: About the same as Ninurta. For photos where you have the origin source, archivist perfectionists (and all gov't libraries & most Univer libraries) usually go with .TIFF (for lossless image archiving) as it supports the CMYK color model for printing. I rarely ever use TIFF and the downside is you need massive amounts of storage space that make it cost prohibitive. Go with PNG.
BMP is bloated proprietary crap and never had a good use for it. Might as well use PNG for lossless image compression with less space consuming plus it is an established open file format, developed by the PNG Working Group.
PDF/A compliant (/A stands for archive) is an ISO standard for the permanent archiving of formatted documents and should be readable for longer than more conventional PDF formats. PDF/A differs from PDF where PDF/A files are self-contained which elminates the common problem with garbled layout and missing characters. Data I know I'm not going to edit or very rarely I save into PDF/A files.
The long-term readability of the PDF/A format is achieved by dispensing with certain functions and embedding all fonts in the file. A PDF/A file is recognizable by the blue bar in Adobe Reader. By default it will open as READ ONLY until you enable editing.
IMAGES: About the same as Ninurta. For photos where you have the origin source, archivist perfectionists (and all gov't libraries & most Univer libraries) usually go with .TIFF (for lossless image archiving) as it supports the CMYK color model for printing. I rarely ever use TIFF and the downside is you need massive amounts of storage space that make it cost prohibitive. Go with PNG.
BMP is bloated proprietary crap and never had a good use for it. Might as well use PNG for lossless image compression with less space consuming plus it is an established open file format, developed by the PNG Working Group.
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." – Thomas Sowell