Yesterday I had a long conversation with Ron Cox at Serif Software. If you are UK you will probably know of them, but for those who don't, they product inexpensive (by windows standards) software that does most of what the market-leading expensive software does. Their flagship is PagePlus 8 + PDF, a desktop-processing program that has excellent booklet printing (A4 folded to make A5 booklet, with pages printed in appropriate pairs), and can convert the whole to PDF.
I took the opportunity to tell him that there is a need for software like theirs for Linux. This led him on to tell me that the company has now been bought back by the original programmer team, and are now free to make their own decisions about the future. They are fully aware of the greed and bad practices of M$, and of the growing awareness in the marketplace. He talked also of the increasing awareness of security issues. They are, however, still small, and the market constrains them to write for the maximum market. He said that they simply could not afford the development costs to write for Linux, much as they would like to, so they had made a conscious decision that they would write to the highest degree of standards compliance they could manage. They believe that this will ensure that their products work with any of the windows emulators. It's not the ideal answer, but I did like the degree of awareness I heard, and I think they have made the best decision they can at this stage. Meanwhile, before Christmas I intend to get Win4Lin and try it. Anne
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