Let's come back to Mr Wouter Vanden Hove problem.
Professors might make a plain text copy of their .doc, losing formatting.
The result - a floppy with this file.txt - would certainly be somewhat ugly, but you could just add a notice encouraging any willing reader to start form this universally readable ASCII version and elaborate a new one with LaTeX, Docbook, Texinfo or whatever transparent formating mean he wishes.
The transparency is asked so that te community can work with the distributed document, so just let the community work...
Hoping it helps.
Guillaume Ponce http://www.guillaumeponce.org/