[plug] MyDoom virus/worm

Craig Ringer craig at postnewspapers.com.au
Thu Jan 29 19:32:14 WST 2004


On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 19:11, James Devenish wrote:
> Does *any* Microsoft software play nicely with PDF?

Not that I've heard about. After all, .doc is the universal document
format, right?

Then again, I'm less than thrilled with OSX's poor save-as-PDF, given
that it appears to be for rather low quality output. One appears to need
to print to PostScript and use GhostScript to get results. Of course, at
work I'm now getting tons of Word docs saved that way as "ready to
print" ads. Sure, the graphics will be pixellated and icky - but the
customer doesn't understand that, because "they look fine on my screen".
Therefore any problem is on our end, and they shouldn't have to pay a
production charge or supply us the original artwork. *sigh*.

Anybody know if OSX 10.3 includes GhostScript? At least that way I could
send them an AppleScript (after finding someone who can write that
stuff) to distill a PostScript file to PDF with -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
.

>  Microsoft is purported to have twisted Adobe's arm to screw with
> fonts, so I would have thought that was an indication that they had some
> interest in PDF.

I'd be very surprised if they developed any serious interest in PDF
unless they could at least partially control it first. Are they really
likely to improve PDF support in Office, when that makes it easier to
communicate with Office users without having to own Office yourself?

After all, look at the recent "Open" XML format for Word. An impressive
effort at loud PR and few real results.

Craig Ringer




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