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On Friday 05 January 2007 16:18, Benjamin A'Lee wrote: > On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 03:58:45PM +0000, Paul Sutton wrote: > > Ok Word files open in Openoffice.org, but complex files have been know > > to cause problems, All I can really say here is that PDF doesn't do what it says on the tin. I worked for a label making company, and as the difference between a £100 designer pair of jeans and the £10 pair was often just the label the label itself was of course a lot more valuable than the jeans. It was decided to use locked PDF 's so that the places where the labels were made couldn't jerk the system - if fake labels were produced we would be able to tell where they were made.. It rapidly became apparent that untraceable forgeries were being produced as fast as the real thing. It became apparent that, if a frigged pdf document was found on a site we had emailed we couldn't actually prove we hadn't sent it to them - we could make fake pdfs and frig the timestamp on the mail server etc - as they could. The only way to we could do that was with signing. > > And frankly I have no wish to install 300+MB (according to aptitude) of > OpenOffice just to read a word document. I agree - but I've yet to see documentation that cant be done just as well in HTML - in fact frequently better because things like bookmarks can be made to work more easily, free flowing the parts of a document that are suitable means you can view multiple documents on screen simultaneously - something that cant be done easily with 'page formatted' documents - try putting two pdf or word documents side by side on screen for comparison and then try the same with two free flowing HTML documents. PDF is a tree killer! As for content re-use - and to some extent isn't that what FLOSS is about? PDFs make that difficult. If you want to modify a PDF ore extract some image from it then you need an editor - which is either cash or disk expensive or both. But the data is not secure in it - if you can read it you can read it..PDFs wont provide security just inconvenience. While there may be some real use for PDF's (other than force of habit) IMHO they should never be used for simple communication. We may have cheap terrabyte disk arrays and some of us have fast ADSL but downloading a 500k pdf document on a phone modem to discover its just a couple of A4 pages and a few dozen subtly different fonts that would have fitted in 10k of HTML and been just as readable......and at least with HTML you could have used CSS and changed the appearance of the document at the drop of a style sheet. And as for changing the phone number of head office and finding you've 10billion word and pdf documents spread over 10 thousand pcs's to update........ Sorry to bang on about this but Microsoft sold us office many years ago and we know they cant innovate :), hangers on like PDF and Open Office are only making things worse for their users. Tom te tom te tom -- 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