Distributing .doc and .pdf files ties the user to expensive, propietry sofware from large immoral companies such as microsoft and apple.

RTF format is an open standard - it can be opened by anyone! Restricting publication to users of certain brands of computers does not help reach a large audiance.

I'd hope people against Bush are also against Bill Gate's empire, and are using GNU/Linux or FreeBSD. Both are free (free as in freedom! But also as in costing no money)

In m$ word, select "Rich Text Format" from the format drop down on the save as dialog. Cool - now any1 with a computer can read ur stuff!

Er, I'd agree completely about M$ Word (.doc) files -- horrible things. Almost anyone can print PDFs though ... you don't need Adobe Acrobat Reader, the free GNU Ghostscript is quite capable of printing them for you. On Linux I find it a lot less hassle than hoping I can find something that understand the right dialect of RTF... (though the latter is obviously preferable to Word format, and useful if you want the document to remain editable).