Hi, On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 6:31 PM, planas <[email protected]> wrote: >> Most places that have any kind of leaflet, posters or documentation to >> download >> want to have some control over the way it looks. Sadly there is not an >> adequate >> Open Document Format so people use PDF. Since PDF is so widely used it >> forces >> everyone to use it. I don't think we can make a stand against that right >> now. >> We have to use PDF or else marginalise ourselves. >> >> >> Most places that do have pdfs to download also have a button to the Adobe >> site >> to download their latest reader (for free) in case people can't read pdfs >> even >> though that is desperately unlikely. I think we should have a similar button >> but perhaps we could choose someone other than Adobe?
> True most people are conditioned to look a pdf file. But one save LO > documents with a password which maintains version/document control. This > feature is (also in MSO) is rarely used, I think because most people are > not aware of it. The Acrobat Reader is a marketing tool for Adobe to > make pdf popular and improve sales of the Acrobat. There are currently > several free readers for Linux and Windows. Some are considered better > than Reader itself. Maybe instead of link to Adobe we have a link, if > possible, to a FOSS pdf reader. People can still read the pdf and we > promote some sister projects. > > What some have done to get around needing Acrobat to prepare pdf's is > use a suite like LO that can export the document as a pdf. Any pdf > generated we need can be done in LO and we state that on the page. Any > time we revise the document we do it using LO. I have been aware of this > feature in OOo/SO for many years when MSO did not have it. > I dunno, I may be conditioned, but I tend to look on PDF as a pretty generic, independent format these days. I realise that Adobe owns the copyright on PDF, but I have a third-party reader on my Linux system, and such readers are/have been available for every/almost every computing platform. So I don't tend to take much account of the "political" implications, I just see the convenience/simplicity aspect... So I see PDF as one very practical final publication medium. ODF's .odt is the format for storing work in progress, although it can perfectly well be used for viewing documentation, provided that the user has LibO or another ODF-compatible tool installed. It allows us to do perfectly adequate version tracking and team collaboration. For instance, if we could get ODF integrated more into Alfresco, we'd have a pretty cool tool. That's something I'll be investigating/agitating for. Practically-speaking, I reckon we'd be a bit short-handed to produce HTML publications, and I don't see a *screaming* need for it. But if somone disagrees and wants to put the time in to do the work, then please dig out and go ahead - I'm sure we'll give you whatever support we can. -- David Nelson -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
