Re: pdfs on windoze, which app?

Sridhar Dhanapalan <[email protected]> writes:
> 2009/3/16 Voytek Eymont <[email protected]>:
>> On Fri, March 13, 2009 3:49 pm, Matthew Hannigan wrote:
>>> On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 08:57:39AM +1100, Voytek Eymont wrote:

[...]

> OpenOffice.org has a button on the toolbar to instantly create a PDF.
> How is that difficult?

Having helped migrate a number of non-IT users to OpenOffice over the
years, substantially.  The changed interface and different behaviour of
the tool really throw off many people.

[...]

> IMHO that's the biggest selling point of OpenOffice.org. PDF is the
> best way to ensure that a document looks _exactly_ the same on all
> computers. Word processor formats (ODT, DOC, etc.) are editing formats
> and were never designed to maintain visual fidelity across systems.

This isn't true: some word processor formats, notably those from
Microsoft, are not well designed to do this.  Even they can, so long as
your font licensing allows — simply configure the tool to embed fonts,
and those fonts (and their metrics) are maintained.

Even before that, using standard fonts from non-crazy vendors would
work: it wasn't really until Microsoft had fonts that were nominally
identical, but practically distinct, that this issue of font metrics
across platforms became a real issue.

Other word processor formats embedded font metrics, allowing them to
format and display correctly even when font substitution happened.

> Files will look and behave differently based on printer settings,
> installed fonts and a myriad of other local issues.

This is frequently true in practice, today, although mostly on the
Windows platform: fonts, and font metrics are much more uniform and
predictable on Unix and Unix-derived platforms.

Regards,
        Daniel
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