Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Mordechai Behar]

I had a similar experience.
I recently switched to a different college in a renewed attempt to gain my
undergraduate in Compsci. Much to my chagrin I discovered that this
college, which bills itself as being a technological college, is firmly
entrenched in the Microsoft field. I tried talking to each and every
professor and TA in turn, about why it is so difficult for them to click
the Save As PDF button in MS Word so that people like me would be able to
read the homework, not to mention the class material.
And don't ask about the arguments I had about forcing people to use Visual
Studio and the Microsoft compilers instead of the gcc.
Much frustration.
The thing is, they keep coming back to the same old "this is what everybody
uses" argument. And when I point out that clearly this isn't so, since I
don't use MS, apparently it is my own fault for being a non-conformist.
And so, in order to be able to complete my courses I am forced to either
shell out for proprietary software or come up with creative solutions. One
such solution was to remotely connect to the college's servers and use the
software available there on the Windows 2003 server. Which works best for
converting documents to PDF, but not so good with programming. Apparently
programs that compile in VS 2008 don't necessarily compile in VS 2010.
Who'd have thought?

I don't want dissuade you you, and wish you the best of luck, but I
wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. This harps back to a similar,
recent thread about Israeli websites being designed for IE6, the people in
charge are behind the times, and firmly convinced that the rest of us are
at fault for it.
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland <boaz.rymland at gmail.com>

> Hi all,
>
> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
> formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly
> schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it
> as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>
> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
> years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the
> arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF)
> document formats.
>
> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Boaz.
>
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