Open document formats

[David Mertz, Ph.D.]

|See, this is something I really don't understand.  I will agree that PDF
|or html would have been a better choice, but not everyone can generate
|PDF ya know.  With this kind of attitude, we'll forever be regarded as
|the extremists who won't listen to anything ....

Who on earth cannot generate PDF?!

As far as I know, every OS, since maybe 1985, has had drivers for
postscript printing.  Almost all the applications that do not use OS
drivers also support postscript.  That's probably enough right there to
address the need for open format... no one here would complain about
documents made available as .ps (or better still, .ps.gz).

However, PDF does have some advantages over PS.  One might use ps2pdf
<http://www.ps2pdf.com/convert/index.htm> or Ghostscript
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/> to perform the ps->pdf conversion, if
that is desired.  The commercial Adobe Acrobat program will also output
directly to PDF.

These tools are freely available to users of just about every platform,
usually in either source or pre-compiled versions.

Now if the question is "who is TOO LAZY to generate PDF?"... maybe the
answer is different.

--
    _/_/_/ THIS MESSAGE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Postmodern Enterprises _/_/_/
   _/_/    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[mertz at gnosis.cx]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  _/_/
  _/_/  The opinions expressed here must be those of my employer...   _/_/
 _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ Surely you don't think that *I* believe them!  _/_/