Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Etzion Bar-Noy eza...@tournament.org.il: Because most households in israel do not buy their office... It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school headmaster does not assume that either. He/she knows most people just have their office installed, and they care nothing about it. Then the argument is that sending .docx files encourages piracy. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com: I bet it cannot read my teacher's document!: a table full of oversized text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as well! :-) oh boy. I had to release some steam!... :-) If that file does not open well in Open Office, then send it to me and I will file bugs on it to get OOo / LO fixed. Note that the document will be made public. Thanks. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:23, geoffrey mendelson geoffreymendel...@gmail.com wrote: It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not provide for Hebrew. I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not unique. Please let me know what these features are, so that we can file OOo / LO bugs on them. You can call me, though I do not claim to _speak_ English as well as I write it: 054-7881700 I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew formatting. Mac users have to buy niche packages which do, but they do not run on any other platform. Hebrew Open Office has some bugs, but nothing terrible. So does MS Office. I use OOo in Hebrew very often. Feel free to direct to me any OOo users that have trouble. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com: of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice and Google docs (imported). Boaz, please send to me the document so that I can file OOo / LO bugs. Thanks. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org: How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit... HTML is not a file format. What would become of the images and CSS files? -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 15:52, Micha mi...@post.tau.ac.il wrote: I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return). For this you need to define a custom header / footer for the page. Is this easier / more intuitive in MS Office? How is it done there? Neither can do proper math if their life depended on it, or make it cross platform (openoffice can't handle microsoft equations and vice versa). MS Office equations are not cross-platform. Actually, when importing MSO = 2007 into older MSO products, the equations are transformed into images and are no longer editable either. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 16:38, Meir Michanie me...@riunx.com wrote: Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to run windows in vmware,... Thanks, I just wrote to them. another site that kids have access for free if they login through ofek is brainpop. It's hard to explain to your kids to suffer their lack of access to those site for a noble purpose of using OSS. This is a perfect time to explain: 1) They cannot have everything they want 2) Life is unfair 3) Some people (the management of that site) are irresponsible and hurt others That is how my 5 and 3 year old daughters would hear it in this situation. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Mordechai Behar mordecha.be...@mail.huji.ac.il: Those are just developer tools, and even then, only a few institutions in Israel are accepted as viable places of study that will allow a student to download the software. A better system is the MSDAA (Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance) which allows a student who is registered for specific courses in specific institutions to download and use nearly every Microsoft application, including the actual operating system and office suite. However, to the best of my knowledge this is only available to compsci and computer engineering students at Hebrew University. In mechanical engineering at the Technion we had access to MSDAA, but Office was not included. Everything else, including Windows 7, was. The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted software, I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS. I cannot find details about this. If you can, I would love to know. My wife is a therapist and gets some Department of Education benefits, such as a reduced interest loan at Mosad. I think that the length and speed of growth of this thread points to just how frustrated we all are at the current situation. So why don't we change it? We happen to have Hamakor, a registered nonprofit organization to promote the use of free and open source software in Israel. So why not start some kind of campaign? A public message? People are still riled up about the social protests of the past summer, we could ride that wave. I've been active for years, writing to websites and other entities. Instead of organising, we are better off being disparate in my opinion. If Ofek receives a letter per week requesting Firefox support, that is more convincing than a letter from some unknown organisation complaining about freedom. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 02:43, Oron Peled o...@actcom.co.il wrote: If not there are some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the OpenDocument formats. There was a Sun plugin, which was covered in the above interoperability paper, but: * It needed some registration to use (so I didn't test it) * I'm not sure if still exists after Oracle bought Sun. It now costs $99. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 8, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote: This is a perfect time to explain: 1) They cannot have everything they want 2) Life is unfair 3) Some people (the management of that site) are irresponsible and hurt others That is how my 5 and 3 year old daughters would hear it in this situation. I see it differently. Not because I like it, or agree with it, but because I am a cynic and believe the Israeli mindset to be different. I see it that they will say that they have a limited budget and the cost of providing the service to Windows users is something they must do, but to pay the extra money for FOSS support is a losing bet, as they don't know if anyone uses it, and they can use Windows (and M/S products) instead. If they want to make their service more accessible, then they would spend what little money they have on iPod/iPhone/iPad apps and possibly Android ones. With that in mind, I think that the place to lobby for increased FOSS accessibility is the ministry of Education who controls these things, while private schools are just not going to have the money. :-( Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 16:38, Meir Michanie me...@riunx.com wrote: Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to run windows in vmware,... The tech support representative for Ofek says that the site will soon support Firefox. Check back in a few weeks, and if it doesn't work then write to them. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:55, geoffrey mendelson I see it differently. Not because I like it, or agree with it, but because I am a cynic and believe the Israeli mindset to be different. I see it that they will say that they have a limited budget and the cost of providing the service to Windows users is something they must do, but to pay the extra money for FOSS support is a losing bet, as they don't know if anyone uses it, and they can use Windows (and M/S products) instead. Presenting DOC/ PDF as Windows / FOSS is a false dichotomy. Presenting it DOC / PDF as works only on expensive or pirated software / works on all computers and mobile devices is the key. If they want to make their service more accessible, then they would spend what little money they have on iPod/iPhone/iPad apps and possibly Android ones. See above, PDF will support those devices already. With that in mind, I think that the place to lobby for increased FOSS accessibility is the ministry of Education who controls these things, while private schools are just not going to have the money. :-( -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 02/05/2012 10:26 PM, geoffrey mendelson wrote: On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote: yuck! So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to reduce MS/Office sales? OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too. Bad because it's dumping, a practice banned by the WTO? I'm somewhat skeptic about the validity of an argument that it gives an unfair advantage to the side that does not intend to sell their product, but to give it away for free. The side being the OO developer community. Of course, for Sun it's a tactic to undermine the MS profit stream, I agree. However, in case when, if not by intention, but by result it aligns surprisingly well with the direction large companies rarely take -- the benefit of all (literate) mankind, I don't mind at all. Before you go you must be anti FOSS on me, bear in mind there were many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice). Crushed in the same way BSD or GNU Hurd are crushed by the Linux kernel? I'm having trouble subscribing to that kind of POV. FOSS projects don't compete in the same way proprietary products do. A piece of open and free code lives as long as there is someone to maintain it. I, for one, use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors. -- MV ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 22:09, Michael Vasiliev mycr...@infoscav.net wrote: I, for one, use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors. troll I knew that I'm not the last KDE 3 lover out there! /troll -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
