[KLUG Members] Re: StarOffice to PDF -- okay, it's obvious that people are missing my point

[Bryan-TheBS-Smith]

John Bridleman wrote:
> Seems like a lot of work and I think a little is lost during
> each conversion.

Of course.  At the same time, you lose a lot by using a word processor
in the first place.  Professional documentation and publication is a job
for typeset.  MSWord is too slow and horrendous to manage when it comes
to large documentation files and projects, especially with multiple
writers.

> I was able to get it run through Adobe Acrobat on a windows
> machine.

First off, not all of us want to fork over some dough for Acrobat
Distiller.

Secondly, TeX -> PDF c/o pdftex, hyperref, and other associated
utilities results in _automatic_ generation of bookmarks, intra-document
and even inter-document references with _0_effort_.  Using the
MSWord-Distiller approach requires the user to put forth a
_lot_of_effort_. 

This might be fine for small articles.  But when you get up to writing
books, or documentation sets, TeX is far superior.

> I also tried it the way Adam suggested. The Acrobat file was
> a lot smaller and looked great. The StarOffice conversion
> ps2pdf file was huge and added 2 pages to the file. (4 pages
> vs 6 pages).

That's because ps2pdf is rastering _everything_ as vectored and
bitmapped Postscript graphics -- _including_ many fonts as bitmapped. 
Adobe Distiller optimally renders what it needs, usually vector, rarely
bitmapped.

> We still have a long way to go regarding pdf files.

No, I think you are continuing to miss my point.  You are rastering
Postscript and then converting to PDF.  If you "skip the middleman," you
get much more efficient conversion.

[ Side note:  I take it you don't know much about Aladin Ghostscript. 
;-PPP  I is *NOT* designed to be a PDF generator, just a Postscript
rastering engine. ]

We have powerful PDF capabilities in Linux right now.  But you must be
using an underlying documentation language like TeX to get them.  TeX is
a very "all encompasing" typeset -- and just about anything can be
represented in TeX.  TeX and PDF almost go "hand-in-hand" as both were
created for professional print publication.  With TeX, not only do you
get better PDFs, but you get the automatically generated with "all the
goodies" with *0* effort.

It's kinda like using Photo-editor to do Visio diagrams.  You can do it,
but it will not only not give you what you want, but they will look at
and eat up a lot more space.

I could write a book on Documentation, how Typeset (e.g., TeX) compares
to Word Processing (e.g., MSWord, AbiWord, StarWriter) and Desktop
Publishing (e.g., MSPublisher, FrameMaker, KWord).

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith    mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org   chat:thebs413
Engineer  AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.  http://www.linux-wlan.org
President    SmithConcepts, Inc.    http://www.SmithConcepts.com
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