[time-nuts] John Vig elected President of IEEE

Chuck Harris cfharris at erols.com
Mon Dec 10 16:42:30 EST 2007


Bruce Griffiths wrote:

>>> I wish somebody could make a pdf of that, I don't have (and don't
>>> want!) access to Powerpoint[1].
>>>     
>> Sure you do, it is called: "OpenOffice.org" ;-)
>>
>> -Chuck Harris
>>   
> Chuck
> 
> That method isnt always very successful especially when newer versions
> of powerpoint are used to generate the slides.
> For this particular powerpoint file OpenOffice renders some text on at
> least one page unreadable.
> 
> In the case of html pages (at least with Linux or FreeBSD) converting to
> pdf files can be done by first printing to a postscript file and then
> opening the resultant postscript file with Ghostview and then printing
> it to a pdf file.
> 
> Bruce


Hi Bruce,

The difference you are seeing is because there is no equivalent font, on
your system, to the microsoft patented font specified in this Powerpoint
document.  OO.org makes a best guess as to what the document wanted, and
uses that for display.

Unfortunately, the best guess is about 5% larger in size.

This comes about because, Microsoft apparently didn't understand the
internationally standardized font sizes when they wrote their Office
suite.  The open source folks refuse to adapt to broken software as a
default condition.  I believe if you install the intentionally broken
Open source clone of the True Type fonts, you will see the presentation
as its author intended (+/- minor changes to stay legal).

Powerpoint has its own problems dealing with documents that were made
on differing Powerpoint versions, as does the rest of the MSOffice suite.

-Chuck Harris



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