New HIP questionare and rules

[Andrew Gabriel]

Apparenytly required from Monday, and you can no longer place your house on the market until the HIP is completed (used to be able to do so when HIP had been ordered).

[Tim S]

Andrew Gabriel coughed up some electrons that declared:

That'll help the ailing housing market then...

[Tim S]

Andrew Gabriel coughed up some electrons that declared:

Just to be awkward, I also emailed them asking for a PDF or other more "open" version, instead of a totally proprietry encoding (MS Word).

I know OpenOffice manages it, but that's not the point! And may not always be true.

[Vortex2]

> --

If you're selling a knackered house to a developer (ie the house in all likelyhood will be demolished), do you still need to get a HIP?

[Brian L Johnson]

>>> Just to be awkward, I also emailed them asking for a PDF or other

You should use Microsoft's free Word Viewer:

Using Word Viewer also means that, as with the PDF, you can't accidentally alter the document. It is simply a 'viewer'.

HTH. :)

[Huge]

>>>>>> Just to be awkward, I also emailed them asking for a PDF or other

your solution to the use of proprietary file formats is a piece of propietary software? You don't really understand this, do you?

[Tim S]

Brian L Johnson coughed up some electrons that declared:

Does it work on Linux, Solaris and *BSD? That was more my point to them...

Cheers

Tim

[Tim S]

Vortex2 coughed up some electrons that declared:

>>> --

Only if you "market" it.

My solicitor told me that if I sold to someone who had approached me, without direct marketing, then I didn;t need a HIP. That was a year ago.

Cheers

Tim

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

How does that help on a non BillyGoat platform?

[Fred]

What is wrong with using OpenOffice?

Isn't the pdf format just as "proprietary"?

[Man at B&Q]

[e-mail]...

Not any more. There are any number of non-Adobe PDF readers and writers.

MBQ

[Tim S]

Man at B&Q coughed up some electrons that declared:

Not suggesting that anyone would try and read this stuff on a mobile phone, but if you did, phones are more likely to have a PDF viewer than *office or some dodgey viewer.

The even worse case is when people insist on emailing a word attachment (or even PDF) with 2 paragraphs of plain text instead of emailing the bloody text in the first place - a message I keep badgering the local school's headmistress about.

It's a pity that all office workers who are obliged to communicate with the public don't have a basic course in technology...

Or blame MonkeySoft - most email programs require positive effort to want to write something as an attachment. LookOut seems to manage to make it a sort of default in some cases.

Cheers

[Andrew Gabriel]

I'm well out of date now, but in the early days of PDF, it was fully published. Somewhere I have Adobe's document*, as I wrote software to produce PDF's. It was originally a wrapper around postscript, but I believe other document technologies have been added over the subsequent years.

• Unfortunately, a search of the bookshelves fails to find it. I still have the original Adobe Postcript and EPS specifications, although I also can't find the Postscript Cookbook, which was another useful book. Probably left them at work, several employers back, even though they were mine :-( .

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

I repeat.....

PDF is an inter-platform format. Not that I appreciate getting those clogging up my inbox either mind.

One of my associates sends attachments containing nothing but plain text because saving as text is too complicated. :-)

Oh by the way, you are meant to snip the sig lines when responding to a post.

[Bob Eager]

>>

alter the document. It is simply a 'viewer'.

And that helps how, exactly, if you don't run the proprietary operating system?

[Ed Sirett]

Originally, perhaps. But the format is openly published. There are many open source implementations of viewers.

M$ file formats are secret (although the folks at Openoffice.org do a great job of reverse engineering them), they are radically 'improved' and 'extended' every few years. Such that many people find it easier to pay for new versions of proprietary software than ask to the documents to be sent in something that everyone can easily read.

[Rod]

A few years ago MS did make available the file formats for Word (and, IIRC, Excel). Probably changed them in important ways by the next release... :-)

(Think it took heavy pressure from US government to achieve this.)

[dennis]

They are actually published and are not secret ATM.

[John Rumm]

liked the intro:

"If you are the seller, you should be aware - ? Answers given in this form should be truthful and accurate to the best of your knowledge. The questions have been designed to help the smooth sale of your home. Misleading or incorrect answers are likely to be exposed later in the conveyancing process and may endanger the sale.

? Information included in this form does not replace official documents or legal information. You should be prepared to provide such documents on request in support of the answers given in this form."

So roughly translated - this is a complete waste of everyone's time.

More interesting are the number of questions it omits - like anything to do with part P or chancery repair encumbrances. Still these are all on the law society questionnaire which no doubt the conveyancing solicitors will lob at you in short order anyway.

[John Rumm]

A fun book that one... all sorts of interesting things to download to a printer to confuse people!