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First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

Posted Aug 13, 2005 8:34 UTC (Sat) by sachinrase (guest, #31803)
Parent article: First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

http://people.debian.org/~rkrishnan/debconf-india.pdf

Has title in Properies as M$ Windows word ? why why ?


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First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

Posted Aug 13, 2005 8:49 UTC (Sat) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138) [Link]

Good one. :-)

But are Free Software people restricted to use Microsoft ?

First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

Posted Aug 13, 2005 8:51 UTC (Sat) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138) [Link]

Sorry!

Restricted to not use Microsoft

First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

Posted Aug 13, 2005 9:06 UTC (Sat) by paivakil (guest, #31804) [Link]

That was because the guy who created the pdf (probably at the host institution, which does not appear to be too GNU/Linux friendly) used a non-Free software.

First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

Posted Aug 13, 2005 10:06 UTC (Sat) by gnu (subscriber, #65) [Link]

> Has title in Properies as M$ Windows word ? why why ?

Should you really care what editors others use ? I don't. There are more important issues to solve in this World than looking at what others do and make issues out of it.

First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

Posted Aug 13, 2005 17:42 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Has title in Properies as M$ Windows word ? why why ?

>Should you really care what editors others use ? I don't. There are more >important issues to solve in this World than looking at what others do and >make issues out of it.

Sure there are more important issues.. like AIDs or starvation or whatnot.. but they don't realy enter the discussion much when your talking about software.

Thing is is that when your hear PR from a company or orginization it's always best to do some more investigating to try to figure out how full of crap they are. For instance I went to novells website downloaded a pdf describing the virtues of Linux over Windows, except the PDF itself was made using MS Office and Acrobat distiller.

So it's something that makes you go 'hmmmmm', maybe they are trying to give me a line of crap for marketting reasons, right?

The PDF was originally authored in Windows, definately. PScript5.dll is a postscript driver file... So what you do if your using Word or whatnot and don't want to pay for a Adobe Distiller license you setup a fake postscript printer. You send the output to a file, collect the resulting postscript file and send that to a pdf conversion tool. Or maybe it works like that when you setup a CUPS or lpd server as a network printer to catch ps files from windows clients and turn that into PDFs. It's quite handy actually, and much cheaper then paying for Adobe and such. There is a handy little tool called ps2pdf that does it well.

In the PDF file itself I can't find any reference to word, microsoft, office, or anything else. Usually those types of things leave a mark on the file.. like it'll stick in the version and name of MS Office or whatnot.. so I am not discounting them using OO.org or Abiword, but I think that it's likely that it's either MS Word from Office, or just plain old wordpad.

On my Debian unstable machine gs-gpl is at version 8.15...

~$ pdfinfo debconf-india.pdf
Error (0): PDF file is damaged - attempting to reconstruct xref table...
Title: First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference
Author: SNAGARAJ
Creator: PScript5.dll Version 5.2
Producer: GPL Ghostscript 8.15
CreationDate: Fri Aug 12 08:41:56 2005
ModDate: Fri Aug 12 08:41:56 2005
Tagged: no
Pages: 1
Encrypted: no
Page size: 595 x 842 pts (A4)
File size: 36947 bytes
Optimized: no
PDF version: 1.3

So I don't think it's that bad. Probably just a secretary using a version of W2k, 98, or XP that doesn't know how to use Linux.

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