Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 12:45, Mordechai Behar wrote:
> 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?
> 

2008 vs 2010 compatibility is even much worse than you think. By the
way, you can add gcc to the mix, although you can usually get away with
building your project with gcc and in the end wrapping it up with visual
for submission (unless you need windows interface).

> 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.

In Tel-Aviv university, at least the math department, things are better.
As a TA I refused microsoft documents from anyone, including official
university ones. It's not just due to me, but now almost everything
official is sent in PDF or PDF plus word.

Even my students had to find other ways to send information. I even
refused to upload exercises to the official virtual site until it
started supporting linux + firefox.

On the other hand, large parts of the faculty are either mac or linux so
it helps. The advantage with University is that most scientific journals
will only accept latex submission so it keeps the faculty more open to
alternative formats.

> 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland <boaz.rymland at gmail.com
> <mailto: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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> 
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