On 15/05/2013, at 7:54, Marc Paré <marc@marcpare.com> wrote:
As a point of discussion on the printing of .pdf's from .odt:
I was hoping to promote our .odt file format and hope that the people who download and print
brochures would decide on their own to create the .pdf brochure should they see a need for doing
so. This way, we would be assured that the person(s) would at least be using an ODF-compatible
wordprocessor.
This is more of a philosophical view of posting our materials and less of practicality. Does it
make it more difficult to print out our brochures? Well yes, if you consider that some may just
download the .pdf version and go to print with Adobe Reader or another .pdf reader, and, not even
bother having a version of LibreOffice on their system. But IMO, I would then rather see people use
LibreOffice or another .odt compatible wordprocessor do the work. This will at least ensure that
our product and format stand out as a good solid and professional working format from which to
work. It would help in establishing the ODF standard as a gold standard in office formats.
We need to start displacing the .pdf format and we, the juggernaut that we are, are well placed to
do this; there are really only 2 elephants in the room left and its LibreOffice and MSO.
We can't keep saying that the ODF standard is the best of office suite standards and then make use of the
Adobe .pdf file to print our products. We are well placed to encourage/influence more printing houses to host
LibreOffice solutions on their premises for printing purposes. The first question users should say to their
printing houses is "Do you service/support LibreOffice ODF printing?" If the demand is there, the
service will follow. By continuing to make use of .pdf formats, we are diminishing the demand of service for
our own product.
We use LibreOffice in-house for our production work and we know it's strength as a serious work
tool.
IMO, we should start making our influence felt where we can. This will also strengthen our product
with groups who are considering adoption of our suite as they will see our resolve to make the ODF
formats more of the office format standard of choice.
Marc
Two points:
I travel with an iPad. I can download and print a PDF using the iPad. I cannot (yet) run LO on my
iPad. When LO is available on Android, that will help other tablet users -- but not us iPad users.
I don't think we should let ideology get in the way of practicality.
Also, I am of the camp that says, don't give people an editable file (from any office suite or DTP
program) unless you want them to be able to edit it. I would *never* give an editable file to a
printer, if I can possibly avoid it, lest they accidentally change something.
--Jean