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PDF is readable by anyone, plus, In theory I could write a document, save to pdf, send this to every group member by e-mail, then can read it on their computer, and not have to actually print it,. Ok you need a reader, but if my document has screen shots and other graphics. this saves a) money on paper for me b) money on postage, ink, labels c) money on printing at the other end (no need to) d) helps the environment (less tress needed to make paper) Disk storage space is pretty cheap, so it can be full of neatly organised pdf files, by subject or whatever, this not being on paper is far more portable, everyone can get access to it, who needs to, plus it's less of a fire hazard, you may be able to print to fill the paper, but imagine your office moving from a to b, would you rather take 25 cd's with you, or have to empty and move several large heavy filing cabinets in order to move all your printed documents to a new location. By making something un editable is sometimes useful, you could for example type save to pdf, tutor can then look at this and mark your work on a spreadsheet, save this as pdf, and send it back to you, Imagine the cost saving for a large university, With the OU I can print out a academic summary easily and quickly, With pdf what you see is what the end user sees, sometimes you dont want people to edit something, if we were collaborating on a project we can agree on a file format (odt for example) and then produce a pdf of the final output, For the posters I provide both, that way others on the group can use openoffice.org to make changes, and save to pdf, I think this has helped greatly in a number of occasions. pdf is industry standard, Ok it may not be ideal, but at I guess its more environmentally (well tree) friendly, and that benefits the world. Paul >> >> > Why PDF? It offers absolutely nothing to the world. Its just another useless > proprietary format. There were one or two things that required to be printed > exactly to scale - but since you can now print to fill the paper size then > that potential usefulness has gone and its just another way of cluttering up > your computer. > The only other vaguely useful option was to make it uneditable - ie less > usable by the recipient but there are many ways of extracting the text from a > document - pdf2txt OCR etc. > Reading a PDF document in a browser has always been a bit of a nightmare and > gobbles up CPU and disk space. Why on earth does the browser plugin waste > space with a search the web option???? > So you don't actually gain anything through using it but make life difficult > for others. > Oh Happy New Year. > Tom te tom te tom > > > -- DCLUG Meeting date Thursday 11th January 2007 - PRFC from 7:00 http://www.zleap.net http://www.openoffice.org http://www.linux.org -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version 3.1 GIT d S: a C+++ UL++++ P+ L++ W++ N+ W--- O! V! PS+ Y! t+++ 5 X+++ R tv- b- DI! D++ G e H! r! z? -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK---- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html