Re: OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 17:30 +1000, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
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> On 29 Sep 2005 at 15:22, Mike McCarty wrote:
>
> Date sent:      	Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:22:42 -0500
> From:           	Mike McCarty 
> To:             	For users of Fedora Core releases 
> Subject:        	Re: OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out
> Send reply to:  	For users of Fedora Core releases 
>    
> > Tony Nelson wrote:
> > > At 10:50 PM +0930 9/29/05, Tim wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 14:26 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> > Why should I follow around after OO when I can just boot Windows in
> > about a minute and a half, and be assured that the doc is ok? If OO
> > knows there is a problem, then it should tell me. If there is no
> > problem, it shouldn't frighten me. If it doesn't know, then why should
> > I use it?
> >
> > Mike
>
> But I've seen the problem with documents being different if it is sent 
> to someone also using MicroSoft, but having a different printer or 
> fonts. It doesn't print the same. We use to make forms available in 
> Word format, but they would print differently on different system, 
> with different page breaks. PDF files worked with all printers. The 
> only problem was that users couldn't edit the forms, but that wasn't a 
> big issue in our case.

Yes, but historically the idea with PDFs was to have a document that
could not be changed.  Often people would make the PDF expecting it to
be a permanent document.  Now, however, even a PDF can be
edited/parsed/searched so there is no "fixed" form of electronic
document any more that I know of.

The biggest problem I have recently had with PDFs is that they may be
created for one page size (A4) and printed on another (letter) so the
laser printer complains for every page being printed.  That is something
I would like to see managed but is not really the document or the
creators fault.