From helbig@man.ac.uk Tue May 23 20:46:11 2000 Received: from mailhost.rug.nl (mailhost.rug.nl [129.125.4.6]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id UAA65011 for ; Tue, 23 May 2000 20:46:11 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from helbig@man.ac.uk) Received: from gladia.astro.rug.nl (gladia.astro.rug.nl [129.125.6.17]) by mailhost.rug.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id UAA07560 for ; Tue, 23 May 2000 20:46:10 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 20:46:07 +0100 Message-Id: <00052320460705@man.ac.uk> From: helbig@man.ac.uk (Phillip Helbig) To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.1812) Word or PDF for distributing WG5 documents X-VMS-To: SC22WG5@DKUUG.DK X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG > Phillip Helbig wrote: > > > Van Snyder wrote: > > > > > Lawrie Schonfelder wrote: > > > > > > > Everyone can read pdf, the reader is freely available, but you need > > > > relatively expensive prorietry software ... to create it. > > > > > > pdflatex is free. I would be very surprised if there is no Windows > > > version of it. > > > > Ahhh, but you're assuming everyone uses LaTeX. Personally, I think > > LaTeX etc is the best system---it runs on every platform and produces > > efficient, platform-independent output and can easily be converted to > > PostScript, PDF (with working hypertext links), HTML etc. However, WORD > > proponents are unlikely to know LaTeX. > > Let me also play devil's advocate. > > Well, I have never used any form of LaTeX or its predecessors. > Personally, I prefer standard, mainline business office productivity software "Standard" is not compatible with "WORD", at least by my definition of "standard" (not the "industry-standard" doublespeak). > The major disadvantage of formats such as PostScript or PDF is that they > are essentially read-only formats. In some cases, this might be an advantage. > It is very difficult or impossible to > import them into WordPerfect or anything similar so that you have an editable > document. In contrast, it is a fairly simple and straightforward matter to > import documents in MS Word, RTF, or other word processing document formats > into the word processor of your choice. It WOULD be trivial to conver TeX to any other format, including WORD (of course, WORD isn't as expressive as TeX, but I digress), but for obvious reasons Microsoft probably doesn't offer this as an option. I believe there is a LaTeX<--->RTF converter, though.