[GTALUG] PDF as an editable format [was Re: Raspberry PI wifi problem]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk" <talk at gtalug.org>

| 1. Another "iron grip" enjoyed by Microsoft is the MS Office product
| suite (and related web-centric stuff) that keeps much of the world
| shackled to the MS monolith.

The anti-trust action against MS in the 1990's should have split the
company along natural product lines.  US Anti-trust folks really lack
vision and clout.

Canadian anti-trust folks are worse.  I submitted a complaint about 
Microsoft and they were not even allowed to tell me if they were doing 
anything about it.  Clearly they did not.

|  My
| plan in moving to debian Linux is to look for a good document editor
| that uses the PDF format as its native representation. And of course
| there is Open Office that (on Win XP at least) is ok, but hardly as
| slick as equivalent MS product.

It is not reasonable to use PDF as the representation of a living
document.  It is good for representing the formatted result (imitation
paper).

The structure of the document is just not represented in PDF.

I'm not an expert in Microsoft Word but it comes from a very
honourable lineage.  The original author created the Bravo editor at
Xerox PARC.

My impression (not reliable) is that LibreOffice is nowhere near as
elegant.  But it is mostly good enough for my very modest Microsoft
Office needs.

If I cared, I'd probably use LaTeX for a document I needed formatted.
My (adult) kids do.  For a variety of reasons it isn't user friendly.

I have used a lot of troff but don't recommend that.

It really comes down to who you need to share working documents with,
what you like, and what helpful resources are in your community.  Oh,
and how long you need the document format to be supported.

LibreOffice looks to have long-time support.  And it is open source
so it could be maintained even if the Document Foundation fails.  On
the other hand, it is a massive and ugly code base: probably hard to
maintain.