dot matrix printer

[Man at B&Q]

And the constant "upgrades" and compatibility problems between versions make it as big a PITA as Word.

MBQ

[soup]

Is that not more a case of tools being used badly than the tools themselves being bad?

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Jules saying something like:

I find Foxit very useful in the way it will save stuff that's not supposed to be saved :)

[Jules]

Debatable, obviously. Often it seems that the tool can't offer the correct word, though, or (worse still) that the author's made a typo which happens to still be a genuine word - there's no way a spell checker can trap that case (a grammar checker might, but they don't seem to be particularly robust for most writing styles).

There's definitely a failing in most people not using other 'tools' such as proof-reading (preferably by someone other than the author!) or a dictionary*, however.

• I keep meaning to see if there's an OpenOffice plugin to give me right-click "look this up on dictionary.com" (or similar) functionality. That would be quite useful. I've never quite understood why wordprocessors haven't evolved to be able to access dictionary definitions.

cheers

Jules

[Bob Eager]

Yes, but...that's because (whether you know it or not) you have the

2003/2007 Compatibility Pack installed.

Unfortunately half these people would never know to install that...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Only if they start from Word ;-)

I discovered last week that OE7 dos not use th IE rendering engine for HTML formatted emails. It is th Word rendering engine. It cannot cope with any sort of HTML beyond the most basic.

Its AWFUL.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The best example is when people try to be clever, using hard carriage returns and the space bar to justify text in some obscure font thy found in their computer, send the file off and it gets rendered in times roman..and looks a complete dog's breakfast.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not really.

If you export to a stable PDF version, and don't piss around being clever, you get almost identical results on any reader worth its salt.

Th main use you may get are font incompatibilities, but you can choose to embed fonts as well.

There is not much the reader can do when given the font, the kerning values, the point size and an absolute location to print the text on down to 0.01 of a point..to get it wrong.

The ONLY issues I found were transparent images which ghostcript cant render correctly.

[Clint Sharp]

In message , soup writes

More like the tools using them badly.

[Appin]

The message from "Man at B&Q" contains these words:

Something of an exaggeration there. And the real point is that Reader is free, so no-one has any excuse for not being able to read up to date features.

Until last week it was a very long time since I came across anyone who had problems in that connection. Last week, granted, I had sent a file which had been reduced from 10-MB to 5 MB for ease of emailing and the recipient had problems because she had had only version 4 of Acrobat. But then she didn't have broadband either :-). Nothing like the problems of using Word, IME.

[Appin]

The message from "Bob Eager" contains these words:

Sure -- but how likely are they to have it? :-(

Of which there are quite a few around. I accept that there are workarounds for docx -- but Word users tend to be people who just use the standard vanilla product with no add-ins, not even the excellent "CrossEyes" which makes a big improvement in user-friendliness for those producing legal-type documents.

[Appin]

The message from tony sayer contains these words:

Precisely the question I asked. And when they saw the tremendous variations among the attempts at printing out the documents which had been distributed by email, they agreed :-).

[Appin]

The message from Jules contains these words:

If you're sending something out to a potentially-critical audience, then get it checked by a couple of reliable human proof-readers. We all make mistakes, but better to have them discovered before they leave the premises.

True, but reasonable ones aren't all that much more than the rubbish ones.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I often coming across simple documents that don't work correctly on the PDF reader I use under RISC OS. Usually things like spec sheets from RS.

I can't see any reason to even try it as Firefox works so well here.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not me prsonally, but I was developing HTML mails to be snt to customers.'Your order has been dispatched' etc. And a little copmany logo image in t corner.

The HTML was, I thought, if th simplest. In firefox it was perfct. OE couldn't even manage to get th image displayed at all.

It apparently doesn't even begin to understand

[Jules]

Hmm, I have any HTML display/reading capability turned off here. I'm just interested in the information being sent, not lots of logos, colour and flashy graphics...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It may be free, but the latest version may need the latest PC to work on. And not everyone uses PCs - or the latest one.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Makes me wonder what is so different about a document made today over one made 15 years ago on a then competent DTP package? It's only likely to be text and graphics so why should one be forced to upgrade just to read it? Different matter with AV etc files I suppose.

[Dave Liquorice]

In the case of pdf not an awful lot. The version I use is 3.0 (c) 1997 and most of the time it can render pdfs fine. Colour Space is the thing that normally trips it up but, IIRC, when I looked into that it was a limitation of my OS rather than Acrobat.

IMHO if you have a modern version of a program it should be capable of reading and rendering all files produced by older versions and the defaults for generating new ones should be as backwardly compatible as possible. But commercial companies don't want that as it gives no push to buying the "latest and greatest".

[Huge]

If you work in IT, it's virtually impossible.