Legal Research

Download Formats

By Shaunna Mireau

I saw an intriguing tweet from Westlaw today:

@Westlaw: WestlawNext New delivery format: WordPerfect http://ow.ly/2oiFw

Why am I intrigued?

File formats for downloads from free and fee services may seem innocuous, but every change has an effect. For instance, when Queen’s Printers in some jurisdictions changed their format (from HTML to PDF) for publicly available legislation, CanLII had to come up with new collection practices as PDF formats made point in time comparison with existing HTML files ‘difficult’. That is a grand scale example of a file format issue.

A smaller scale example would be rewriting user materials to incorporate a new download format…wait, if you think about producing user guides, it isn’t really a small matter! One simple addition to the download choices requires new screen shots, new text, and new training.

Retrieving a document from a commercial service is the type of task that is either done very frequently, moderately often or rarely. To address this variety of usage types, at my firm we created a “getting a case from Westlaw Canada” screencast video for our Intranet. IF we used WestlawNext and most certainly IF we used WordPerfect creating this user communication would have to be redone. A daunting task when I remember that it took me 4 hours of development time to properly create and test a 3 minute video…in fact, my video still refers to WestlaweCarswell.

In Canada, Westlaw offers downloads in Word, WordPerfect, HTML, Plain text, PDF and Rich Text. One other interesting tidbit is that Westlaw Canada, like other commercial services, offers “Word document” downloads that are actually in Rich Text Format with the Word .doc file extension. I am unable to confirm if this is the same for the “WordPerfect” file format, but I suspect it is.

Do commercial services still need to spoon feed users with a brand labeled word processor file format? Wouldn’t it be easier for just say “Rich Text” since that is what the format truly is? Is having more options for download format necessary? Who uses WordPerfect these days?

I am intrigued again waiting for your comments.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on August 12, 2010 (boomark / email).