New York State has issued a report from their study on document formats and electronic records. The report is available for download as a Word document (doc), PDF or open document format (ODF). I opted for the ODF because it’s smaller and I have OpenOffice available (for free) to read it. The major recommendation of the study is a good one.
Recommendation: The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated.
I agree. Many people want to force Word as the only choice in document creation and distribution. I try not to use Word but instead prefer Lyx. Lyx uses the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) approach for document creation. In other words, don’t worry about trying to format the page or create paragraph templates because the application will do it for you. LyX uses Latex. LaTeX (pronounced /ˈleɪtɛx/ or /ˈleɪtɛk/) is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as 
. LyX creates beautiful documents that can be saved in many formats including PDF. Get the GUI and try it. I think more options are better.
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