Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Benjamin Tayehanpour <benjamin@example.com>]

On Sat, 17 May 2014 21:43:11 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Obviously you've not worked with a coauthor on an academic paper, or a
> policy committee (it's the latter that are the bane of my life, forms
> generated by real bureaucrats are just a PITA).

I obviously haven't. My question wasn't rhetorical.

> What software do you suggest for filling in PDFs?  I have enough
> trouble finding a viewer for Linux that doesn't want nepomuk and the
> rest of the Semantic Desktop, or 4.5GB of GNOME libraries.  Are any of
> the standlones ones capable of handling fill-in PDFs?

As I don't have the same criteria you do, I wouldn't know. I use evince, and to my knowledge it certainly didn't pull in 4.5GB of anything.

> Are any viewers
> at all capable of DTRTing with multiline text boxes that accept up to
> 500 Japanese characters?[1]

I haven't a clue, sorry.

> This makes a lot more sense as a web app to me (Monkeyshow's brain-
> damaged implementations notwithstanding).  PDF forms really don't make
> sense to me (except maybe to Adobe stockholders): PDF is such a
> limited, opaque format.

Well, I'd rather have a thing which did one thing well than ten things poorly. It's debatable whether PDF is either, but I certainly prefer getting a PDF over, say, a .doc or a .docx. Especially if the document is supposed to look in a certain way. With the exception of certain proprietary Adobe extensions (damnation be unto the buggers), I've never had issues with inconsistent PDF rendering.

> Mathematics.  Diagrams.  In-progress tables (OLE spreadsheets can be
> convenient).

So basically, interoperability breaks when best practices aren't respected?

> For all these purposes I'd prefer working in LaTeX, even with complete
> LaTeX novices, but they tend to want to use Word as the editor. :-(

I haven't had much need to do word processing whatsoever. My CV is written in XeTeX, but that's about it. There are so many things I'd like to have a pretext to spend time to learn properly. LaTeX. Emacs. Ed. Lisp. Nyckelharpa...

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