Sam Rogers wrote:
To whom this may concern,
I was a user of open office until today, when I exported a document as a pdf
and sent it to a potential employer - it created the pdf in a completely
illegible font which made me look ridiculous.
I've created many pdf files and have never seen such a problem, so this
is very strange. Both OOo and the free "pseudo-printer" programs I've
used on my Windows systems have just used my installed fonts, although
one of the pseudo-printers seemed to be unable to cope with a particular
font. Did you look at the pdf on your own system before you sent it? Is
the recipient perhaps using some program that takes such a file and
attempts to make it editable/searchable again?
The second reason I am switching to Microsoft is your software's obsession
with saving files in its own incompatible format, which cost me considerable
time to remedy when I had saved 60 or so files and needed to convert to them
to .doc files. When doing that, the layout mucked up. So generally, since I
need my software to actually work, I'm switching.
That "incompatible format" is Open Document Format, the international
standard for creating documents that can be interpreted from a
documented file format rather than from proprietary formats known only
to a single software vendor (and constantly subject to change without
notice, as has happened many times with the Microsoft formats). It is
not OOo's "own" format at all. By means of this "obsession" documents
stored years ago by one vendor can be used by other software vendors,
with no need to try to reverse engineer what was originally done. Among
other things, the files are *much* smaller than the original MS formats
(like .doc) -- though their new Office 2007 formats (like .docx) are
more efficient. Those, however, are even more rapidly moving targets
than is standard for MS.
If you always want files to be produced in Office formats for some
reason (such as your correspondents being unable or unwilling to switch
from the MS-proprietary formats), OOo can be set to use those formats by
default. As with any conversions from or to formats that are maintained
on a proprietary basis, though, there will likely be some problems; how
serious they are depends on the complexity of your document, your own
disciplines in how carefully you maintain consistency, and so on. By the
way, many people have had serious layout problems when they go from one
version of MS Office to another, and some of the older MS Office
documents can't be read at all by the newer versions.
Of course, you are welcome to spend hundreds of dollars updating to
newer versions of Office every year or so, and hoping for the best, if
you really want to! In that case, I'd recommend that as soon as you go
to a new version of Office, you reopen each of your existing documents
and store it again in the current format, so that your old documents
don't get orphaned by format changes later. That's not necessary with
the ODF formats, of course.
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