Re: [tlug] What's with this anti-Apple tirade? [was: 2014-05-10 Linux Quiz]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jim Breen writes:

 > There were, of course, howls of outrage from the LaTeX brigade
 > in Engineering, Science and IT. The bureaucracy backed down and
 > said that PDFs were OK too, but added a warning that for PDFs they
 > wanted an extra proof-reading as "symbols may not convert
 > properly".

Heh.

Monkeyshow's grant reporting webapp substitutes SGML entities for some
Unicode characters (certain variations on center dot, including the
one that Kotoeri prefers, and combining accents -- Heaven help anybody
trying to write Vietnamese words in a report!)  I assume it's part of
a Japanese-ization process in the autosave feature that allows you to
interrupt and restart a session.  The entities get copied verbatim
into the final PDF for some reason.  Yowsa!

BTW, there is no way for researchers to report a bug; you have to
phone in to the help desk and hope that the non-technical secretary
(which makes sense, given that the help desk is mostly dealing with
"WTF does this Monkeyshow-only Japanese mean?" type questions) can
forward it in a sane way.  She did get them to fix the copy-paste
error in one English translation, at least, but I wasn't even going to
try to explain "SGML entity" to her.

So I think I'm going to report this bug in my blog, with SEO turned to
"high". :-)

 > No-one knows quite what they meant by this,

It's not what they mean by it, it's what it means about them. :-P

 > as if there are conversion problems with PDFs, they are more likely
 > to be with Word than anything else.

Exactly.  The bureaucrats produce f**ked-up documents all the time, so
it's not possible for them to imagine a reliable system.