Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

What are the school's arguments for not accepting a PDF? The unsurmountable
difficulty of installing acroread on the teachers' computers? Or is
acroread so hopelessly behind the times that it does not allow marking and
annotating? If the latter, then OOO...

I think the principal should agree that requiring the parents to buy a
computer with Office just for homework is quite unreasonable. I'd try thos
argument before anything else, and maybe instead of everything else.

-- 
Oleg GoldshmidtOn Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re:
Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
> will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
> hopeless geek.

I am not sure about the time not being ripe.

In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
Windows+OpenOffice).

They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
perfect.

And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
for the legal Microsoft Windows).

> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
> longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
> you need either PDF or Google docs.

I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
coming to an end.


--
Nadav Har'El                        |                     Sunday, Feb 5
2012,
nyh at math.technion.ac.il
|-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck -
without
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |it I would have no luck at all!

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