Re: [tlug] Using Linux for the desktop

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 12:38:48AM +0900, Thomas Piekenbrock wrote:

>If you need to run M$ office under Linux, there is a commercial product
>"Crossover" from Codeweavers, which claims to support also Lotus Notes,
>or you can try to run it under Wine (do not know how good the chance of 
>success is)

I don't tried Office XP with Wine a few months ago, and it wouldn't
even install, b/c it has code for detecting whether Windows is installed
on the target machine (it wasn't) and if it doesn't find Windows, it
refuses to install and bails.  IIRC Crossover Office works with 
Office XP, but if anyone is considering it, verify before you buy.

Office 2000 would install, but running it under Wine was somewhat rough.
I hear it works well with Crossover Office, though.

At that time I was running OpenOffice 1.0 or 1.0.1, and had real
problems with a (I thought) relatively simple MS Word doc.  Just
a few embedded graphics and a little text wrapped around them.
The first problem was the person who wrote it (people who are
computer illiterate really shouldn't be starting IT consulting companies),
though: he wanted some graphics, so he surfed the web for them, found
stuff he thought did the job, then embedded them in the document.

So far so good, except the graphics he found were quite large.  Each one
would, on its own, have filled most of the A4 page.  Word auto-resized them
to the size of the borders he put in for them, but he apparently did this 
via OLE (or whatever they call it now), since each time I  opened the
document it would try to fetch the images from the Internet and resize
them as needed on the fly.  This works badly, especially when you have
minimal bandwidth and an unreliable uplink.  When you're trying to 
open the document in something other than MS Word, it works a lot
worse than badly.

Even after I found out what was happening, got the actual images and
resized them with Image Magick and embedded them statically in the
document, OO still had real trouble with the formatting, and exporting
it from Word as RTF didn't help.

In general, though, OO seems pretty good now.  I don't know if some
real improvements have been made to the import filters or if that
document was just so broken it was a wonder that even Word could 
deal with it, but with OO 1.0.3 (backported to Debian Woody from Unstable)
I've had no problems with importing very form-heavy docs such as a job
application form which is available in either Word or PDF format.
I also grabbed the PDF and compared the layouts, and the Word document
opened in OO looked fine.

Which brings me to a digression: does anyone know of a Free editor/writer
for PDFs?  Specifically, something that a person could use to open a 
form in PDF format, fill in the form, and save it again as a new PDF?

Something that would turn the PDF into some other editable file format
(OO's .sxw, TeX, or even MS Word, for example) and then turn it back
into a PDF would be fine, too.  I guess I'm thinking of a functional
equivalent of Adobe Distiller here.

Jonathan
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