[KLUG Members] pdf v document attachments

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 01:20:23 -0500, Andrew Thompson wrote:
>On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 06:39 -0500, Eric Beversluis wrote:
>> On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 21:59 -0500, Andrew Thompson wrote:
>> 
>> > OpenOffice, on the other hand, does generate PDFs. There's an extra
>> > Export option under the File menu just for them. Since it can open
>> > (almost?) all Word documents as well, and costs nothing but bandwidth to
>> > acquire, I'd suggest that as your one-stop shop for DOC-to-PDF.
>> > 
>> Yes, I know about OO exporting to pdf. My point was that most in
>> academia are constrained to use Word or, in some cases, Word Perfect,
>> which don't have this option.
>
>I suspected that might be the case, but that would only be if the
>institution specifically forbade the use of anything else, which in my
>opinion would be terrible policy, but not surprising.

In the hard sciences, standards have traditionally been created and 
imposed by the editors or professional journals, not individual academics
or departments. For a long time, these folks have been pretty adamant
about format and file types suitable for submission, recently they have
broadened the criteria to include some formats supported by commercial
proprietary word processing systems. For a long time (at least 20 years)
prior to that, they had insisted on submission in LaTEX or Postscript.

This meant that EVERY physicist, atronomer, etc. between about 1978 and
2003 was either well-off (and paid someone to lay out their papers), or
learned LaTEX. Let me tell you, most of these guys were not well-off!
I was always surprised that LyX or something similar never caught on 
with these folks, mostly because they thought learning LaTEX pretty
simple (even recreational) after devling into the secrets of stars, 
atom, etc...
						Regards,
						---> RGB <---