Hi,
Most places that have any kind of leaflet, posters or documentation to download
want to have some control over the way it looks. Sadly there is not an adequate
Open Document Format so people use PDF. Since PDF is so widely used it forces
everyone to use it. I don't think we can make a stand against that right now.
We have to use PDF or else marginalise ourselves.Most places that do have pdfs to download also have a button to the Adobe site
to download their latest reader (for free) in case people can't read pdfs even
though that is desperately unlikely. I think we should have a similar button
but perhaps we could choose someone other than Adobe?
True most people are conditioned to look a pdf file. But one save LO
documents with a password which maintains version/document control. This
feature is (also in MSO) is rarely used, I think because most people are
not aware of it. The Acrobat Reader is a marketing tool for Adobe to
make pdf popular and improve sales of the Acrobat. There are currently
several free readers for Linux and Windows. Some are considered better
than Reader itself. Maybe instead of link to Adobe we have a link, if
possible, to a FOSS pdf reader. People can still read the pdf and we
promote some sister projects.What some have done to get around needing Acrobat to prepare pdf's is
use a suite like LO that can export the document as a pdf. Any pdf
generated we need can be done in LO and we state that on the page. Any
time we revise the document we do it using LO. I have been aware of this
feature in OOo/SO for many years when MSO did not have it.
I dunno, I may be conditioned, but I tend to look on PDF as a pretty
generic, independent format these days. I realise that Adobe owns the
copyright on PDF, but I have a third-party reader on my Linux system,
and such readers are/have been available for every/almost every
computing platform. So I don't tend to take much account of the
"political" implications, I just see the convenience/simplicity
aspect... So I see PDF as one very practical final publication medium.
ODF's .odt is the format for storing work in progress, although it can
perfectly well be used for viewing documentation, provided that the
user has LibO or another ODF-compatible tool installed. It allows us
to do perfectly adequate version tracking and team collaboration. For
instance, if we could get ODF integrated more into Alfresco, we'd have
a pretty cool tool. That's something I'll be investigating/agitating
for.
Practically-speaking, I reckon we'd be a bit short-handed to produce
HTML publications, and I don't see a *screaming* need for it. But if
somone disagrees and wants to put the time in to do the work, then
please dig out and go ahead - I'm sure we'll give you whatever support
we can.