[KLUG Members] pdf v document attachments

[Chris Hansen]

Since you were talking about MS Office, you might want to look into 
GhostScript for making PDFs under Windows
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
It's pretty cool stuff, and not too hard to setup as a "printer" with 
some third-party tools.  You'll want to check out the licensing though 
to make sure it works with your environment.

Also, I kind of agree with you, PDF isn't really a great format, but it 
does what it's suppose to do.  I generally never read a MS Word file 
someone sends me, but I'll check out PDFs if that means anything 
(although occasionally it's fun to see undo's/edit histories "hidden" in 
MS Word files; I checked out a job offer through a head-hunter before 
who's customer was clearly obtainable from a strings dump, but not 
otherwise visible in the document.)

I say we all go postscript.. postscript everything.. lets replace html 
with it while we're at it too.. at least in e-mail...

Eric Beversluis wrote:

>At a recent KLUG meeting someone noted that in business people don't
>send email attachments as word processing documents but rather almost
>always use pdf's. 
>
>If this is correct, it raised a number of questions for me, as the
>experience in academia seems different--for example, my wife and I
>regularly send and receive document attachments: scholarly papers,
>letters (to retain formatting rather than squash them into an email),
>resumes and CVs, etc.  Even journals want articles submitted in Word
>format. (Probably because they need to be edited.)
>
>1.  Why would it be considered better to send these as pdfs rather than
>as documents? (One reason is that, by design, pdf's are "portable
>documents" and should create fewer problems opening them if one has a
>different word processor--it was also noted that rtf is designed for
>this purpose.)  Are there other reasons, reasons that would apply as
>well in academia, that businesses send email attachments as pdf?
>
>2. As far as I know, MS Office does not have capacity to convert a doc
>to pdf. So far as I know, most college professors do not as a matter of
>course have access to other software for creating pdfs. Do businesses
>provide everyone with such access (that is, those that use Word or Word
>Perfect)?
>
>Eric Beversluis
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