Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (150 mails)

["Frank Shute" <shute@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 10:33:56AM +0200, Roger Whittaker wrote:
<snip>
>
> > LaTeX ---> DVI ----> DVIPS ----> PS ----> pstill/gs ----> PDF
> 
> ps2pdf works absolutely fine for me.  Does pstill have any special extra
> features?

I might have an oldish version of ghostscript as ps2pdf doesn't pick
up some features eg. the bullets in Malcolm's document didn't come
out.

You seem to be able to finesse things a bit more with pstill
although if I sorted out gs it would probably do just as good a job.
The pstill site if anybody is interested:

http://www.this.net/~frank/pstill.html
 
> As to reading .doc files - well you can open/import them with StarOffice
> or Applixware, and also with kOffice.  SuSE 7.0 includes a free X
> Window program called wordview which extracts the text and displays it 
> in a graphical window.
> 
> But the point is not whether we can read the things if we have to, it's
> whether they are a sensible format for document exchange.  And they're
> not, both because they are a proprietary format and because they are binary.

Thats right. PDF being an open specification allows anybody to right
distillers and interpreters. Whereas .doc you're reliant on MS
making the spec open and transparent, something that they haven't
got a good track record on.

-- 

 Frank 
 
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