converting text to pdf

[lee]

Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> writes:

> As far as the original poster's question is concerned, I have printed
> landscape documents, with text and diagrams.  I used OpenOffice.org, or
> the LibreOffice version, and used its own export as PDF function.

I ruled out Libreoffice quite a while ago because it isn't up to the
task.  Not even a simple mailmerge worked without crashing LO, and the
closer I looked at it, the more bugs I found that were getting in the
way.  So I went with LaTeX (and had to do without tables for that part
because LaTeX cannot reasonably handle tables that may go over several
pages and may contain tables --- which is something LO does just fine).

For anything serious and/or versatile/flexible, you can't get around
LaTeX.  Besides, things like LO come and go, and after a couple years,
you might not be able to read your documents anymore: The effort you'd
have to spend on learning how to program LO is much better spent on
learning more about LaTeX (and maybe perl) because those will very
likely still be around in another twenty years or so when LO may be long
gone.

> There are some advantages to using one or the other, it depends on what
> you're doing.  Supposedly, using an export option in a desktop
> publishing program should give you more control over layout,

DTP programs and WYSIWYG word processors and/or so-called "office
software" like Libreoffice are totally different worlds.  WYSIWYG word
processors don't even have the /concept/ of pages.  Try to do something
with "a page" in one and you'll find that you need a DTP program.

Did they add a DTP module to LO now?  If they did, I might even install
LO just to try out the DTP part.

> and maybe more coherent placement of text.

Uhm, did you ever try to coherently place text (and/or other stuff that
goes on pages) with Scribus?  About 15 years ago, you could do that with
Timeworks Publisher and Ventura if you could find the time to between
having to reboot every 3--20 minutes.  Sadly, Scribus totally misses the
point of a DTP program.  It's like gimp, except that Scribus deals with
pages and gimp doesn't.

> Ever tried highlighting and copying text from a PDF?  Sometimes it can
> be impossible to get several paragraphs to copy in a sensible order.

Yes, I use xpdf for that.  Most of the other pdf viewers don't even let
you mark some text.  There's also pdf2text or so, so you can puzzle
something together.


-- 
Fedora 18