On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Frank Shute wrote:
On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 09:00:25PM +0100, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
There are any number of acceptable open formats - ascii, html, PS, PDF which can be produced by freely available applications.
Produced? PDF? I understood that, like Flash, the readers were free but the producers (apart from some freeware items) cost money.
Ghostscript produces PDF from PS and most things can produce postscript. I actually use a freeware program called pstill to produce PDF.
LaTeX ---> DVI ----> DVIPS ----> PS ----> pstill/gs ----> PDF
ps2pdf works absolutely fine for me. Does pstill have any special extra features? 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. -- Roger Whittaker SuSE Linux Ltd The Kinetic Centre Theobald Street Borehamwood Herts WD6 4PJ ---------------------- 020 8387 1482 ---------------------- roger@suse-linux.co.uk ----------------------