Recently, Massachusetts announced that all documents “created and saved” by state employees from the beginning of next year “would have to be based on open formats.” These open formats include OpenDocument, which is used by OpenOffice – the open-source competitor to Microsoft Office – and Adobe’s PDF format.
Here are some news stories about this announcement:
Legal worries led Massachusetts to open standards – ZD Net
US state embraces open standards – ZD Net
Massachusetts Mandates Open-Format Documents, Edges Towards Linux – eWeek
Although TurboLaw does not (yet) work with OpenOffice, there is a free program available to let you save any document in PDF format, thus complying with the above-mentioned rule. The program, called “PDF Creator,” is available for download by clicking here. PDF creator is easy to install and works perfectly alongside TurboLaw.