Dotan Cohen wrote:
What software, specifically, do you use that is unavailable on Linux? I make it a point to write to one software house or hardware manufacturer a week requesting Linux support. You mention Adobe In-Design and Quark Express, what are the other programs? I've written to Adobe in the past but not about In-Design specifically.
Well In-Design is now the top desktop publisher, replacing Quark Express (thank goodness).
We also have Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Acrobat for handling input files from customers. Note that even an almost pure Linux shop who did the kind of things we do would have to have these on a Windows machine to support their very common use in the corporate world. Clients rightly expect us to print a graphic unchanged.
And we have MS Office on the same machine, for the few cases where OpenOffice.org does not cover MS input properly.
Our current high-speed printing software is PRES. See http://www.printsoft.com.au/products/pres.htm . Our mailing software is Streetsweeper from Mailing Innovations. See http://www.mailinv.com/products/software/streetsweeper.asp .
We also use Personator and Stylelist from Melissa Data. For mail merge we use Pre Post Office (see http://www.prepost.ca/ ). Data base mail merges like that http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/word_processing/writer2_EN.html which would garbage for most files. Name and address have to be first parsed into appropriate sections and the sections compared. Partial-match algorithms must be used so that Jonathan Blume and Jon Blum will match when they are at the same address. Easy tweaking abilities are needed.
Our high speed printers are Xerox and océ models. The Xerox printers come with Sun work stations as print servers with a Solaris operating system.
We also use a large number of programs developed in house to clean up data and produce reports and do special jobs, mostly using FoxPro as the base language. Our basic client/docket software recording database is an in-house program written in Access for Windows 95. It still runs well and works well.
I don’t know what exactly is used now in accounting, other than, of course Excel. They got rid of an MS-DOS based package a few years back.
It may seem surprising that some of our stuff is so old, but that seems normal in business, where if something works, you don’t necessarily ever update it. Xerox would love to have us pay to upgrade their 15-year old printer software, but it works fine, normally delivering data to the printers faster than they can print it.
This is something that many have difficulty understanding, that often you don’t need to change or upgrade software to function with full efficiency. That Windows 98 served us for over ten years means that software cost for the Windows system was almost non-existent. It was only when newer MS software that we needed stopped running on this that it was decided to change.
Recall too, that only seven years ago one could have compared Windows and the products that ran under it with a Linux that still didn’t even support Unicode and had no OpenOffice, and one would naturally not be eager to jump into Linux. Of course the Linux pushers at the time would murmur about TeXt, obivious to the fact that communication is the center of industry and that, at that time, Word was a major organ of communication. Those dealing with clients had to have Word or a reasonable substitute that could read and write Word files. That period seems to have vanished. Now it's almost all PDF and Excel.
Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
