Re: [Fsfe-uk] open office in schools (was Microsoft 'hoovers millions)

[Martyn Ranyard]

At 10:27 AM 7/29/02 +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> I noticed the same problem when I was looking for information in Luton Borough
> Council's web site. They have copies of forms on there in word format. What's
> more they cannot be read using Word 95, which in itself should be used to
> point out that such document formats exclude a significant proportion of
> the intended audience.

If the installs are legitimate, then installing the filters for Word 6/95 
and RTF is no problem, which corroborates your statements below.

> I believe that one of the chief problems here is that the powers that be
> assume that most computers users have Word, and a little deeper thought
> on the subject would lead me to suggest that this is only the case because
> so many people are using unlicensed copies of MS Office. The conspiracy
> theorists out there can fill in the rest of the blanks ;-)

Well, using FAST as a threat might get them to do something, like using OOo.

> I'd like to create a draft letter to fire off to offending information 
> providers
> to explain the problems that word documents cause. Does anyone have a simple
> solution that could be presented to the agencies involved? AFAIK exporting
> a document from Word to PDF requires that you purchase a copy of an Adobe
> product to obtain the PDF file printer driver.

Oh yes.  Install Ghostscript either on every client machine or on a SAMBA 
server, which can create PDFs from postscript files.  The Adobe print 
driver is "free" (Little F) and all versions of windows that I know of have 
the Apple LaserWriter (a postscript-only printer) which can be configured 
to output postscript.

As a company (that I work for), we are currently setting up a solution 
based on GNU/Linux that will create PDFs from anything - that is - paper 
(scanner), any app that can print (postscript) and even monitors (screen 
scrape).  If you think that we should approach them, let us know, I'll 
leave the timing (before or after your letter) to your discretion.

> Cheers,
> Jim Halfpenny

Hope something comes of it.


Martyn Ranyard
Free Software Advocate

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