Some weeks ago I wrote 'Everybody's Guide to OpenDocument' to explain, in non-technical terms, how the adoption of open file formats benefits the lives of all citizens, not only computer techies. A few days later, I received a request to introduce the problems of file formats to an unexpected audience, one that is highly skilled but not in the software field. The Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies is a prestigious public university in Pisa, which is located in wonderful Tuscany. Sant'Anna is specialized in both social sciences (economics, jurisprudence and politics) and experimental ones (agriculture, medicine, industrial and computer engineering). It also hosts the Group of Italian TeX Users and its annual TeX and LaTeX meeting. Outside of this group and the engineering department, the rest of the school does not commonly use Linux. The school administration recently has started to receive OpenOffice.org files, however, but Microsoft proprietary formats still lead the game there..."
