Python Tutorial Was: Guido's regrets: filter and map

[David Brown]

"Fernando Pérez" <fperez528 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:arsqf9$b0d$1 at peabody.colorado.edu...
> David Brown wrote:
>
> > If you can find it, there is a free (!) powerpoint viewer from
Microsoft,
> > along with word and excel viewers.  They are a bit old, and may not
support
> > the latest formats - they may not even still be available.  But they are
> > very much faster than the real MS Office programs, and don't support
macro
> > viruses.
>
> Which I'm sure works wonderfully well under Linux :)

I'm sure that they would work under Wine, given the success they've had with
the real MS Office.  But in reality, the viewers would be more useful to
Windows users - many of whom are lucky enough not to have PowerPoint (and
*really* lucky ones, like me, don't have any MS Office software).

>
> > Of course, you can always use Open Office for PowerPoint files.
>
> Which I have and use when there's no other option. But as much as it's
great
> to have OO, it still takes _ages_ to load (on a very fast laptop with gobs
of
> RAM), and doesn't look on-screen quite as nice as PDF. PDF is simply an
> excellent format for the job at hand: portable distribution of documents
> which retain their original look pretty much perfectly.
>
> Fortunately I live in a world where people communicate in Latex,
PostScript
> and PDF, so I simply very rarely have to bother with Microsoft file
formats.
> And I try to keep it that way :) LyX and XEmacs are enough for pretty much
> all I do document-wise (with OpenOffice for the occasional spreadsheet).
>

OO doesn't take that long for me (W2K, 1.7GHz, 512MB) - maybe the Quickstart
thingy helps?  I'm looking forward to testing it on my home machine (once
gentoo has finished installing.....).  To be entirely honest, however, I
only ever use OO when I am forced to work with MS Office format documents.
Personally I also use LaTeX, with pdfLaTeX to make the pdf files directly -
I agree 100% that pdf is the format of choice for publication (I insist that
all office-format documents are turned into pdf's before being put out on
our website, for example).

mvh.


--
David

"I love deadlines.  I love the whooshing noise they make as they go past."
Douglas Adams

> Cheers,
>
> f.