LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : Michael Firkins <michael@home.lyppard.com.au>
  Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 15:36:33 +101800

Re: PDF's _do_ support copy-paste ! (was SO-WP useless)

Michael,

Thanks for giving me hope --- but....
I just tried doing some text selection in
acroread and gv for a PDF file generated from
a PS file with ps2pdf, where the PS file came
from dvi2ps, out of plain TeX.
Nothing in the way of text selection was possible.

I also asked a friend with wind98/woffice97 to
try the same thing with my PDF file.
Also no luck.
The whole PDF could be read into MS-Word,
but not any subset.
And once inside Word, the PDF contents could not be edited
except with a picture editing program.


================
On the slightly positive side, I've now installed the
Corel Word Perfect 8 that comes with the IDG book
"Word Perfect for Linux Bible".
After changing the CD-ROM mount for the disk
to add the "exec" attribute, I was able to do the
installation, although the script (Bourne shell)
warned that it was not guaranteed to work for
later than 2.0.18 kernel or something. (I use
2.2.10 on the machine in question.)

After getting it installed, I was able to
export my Star-Office file to MS-Word 6.0
format and incorporate it into WP8 -- if I
removed the PostScript file inclusions first.

It does not seem to be possible to include PS or
PDF files in a WP8 document. I tried, and it said
it can't conver the format.
Maybe it can do .eps or .epsi files -- I'll
try that some time.

=========================
My impression of WP8, though, is that it is even worse than
SO, which is even worse than MS-Word, which is much worse
than plain TeX (if you happen to know how to write programs).

Since WP8 can't do even PS files (and SO did actually include and
print them, and they did sort of work in the word97 output),
I'm beginning to think that SO might be the way to go after all.

=========================
Here's the way I think may be best for doing the MS .doc format
in linux -- just keep things simple in the SO editor, and
then export as MS-Word 6.0.
This seems to be so basic as to be acceptable to whatever
runs on the MS OS.
(I tried *.rtf, but that came up as garbage in WP8.)

========================
I must say that after suffering yet again with
the lousy document non-standardization problem,
the amount of suffering inflicted on the world by
the refusal of certain corporate entities to
accept anything that looks like a standard is
unforgivable.
I've seen W-Office 97 for sale in Saigon
for US$13, and think that's a fair price.
Hopefully the crack-down on software sharing in
Asia will lead to a mass exodus into linux.

Cheerio,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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