tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post5197834834754708747..comments2023-09-20T07:28:27.572-05:00Comments on Linux in Exile: Not what they getJim Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11598443864678006773noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-51667893106522357142009-11-05T11:00:12.577-06:002009-11-05T11:00:12.577-06:00try joint collaboration with an english colleague ...try joint collaboration with an english colleague using Word (I'm american). As soon as your colleague pastes a portion of her document into yours, all is lost. The pasted portion carries over properties from the template.dot file, and these gradually metastasize throughout the recipient's organizations entire hard drive. Pretty soon people find themselves opening documents and discovering that they're formatted for A4, or their spell checker mysteriously requests extra vowels in the middle of words. WYSIW (the last W stands for "weird").Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-78040379138302116092009-11-04T22:33:07.832-06:002009-11-04T22:33:07.832-06:00Let's not even talk about Excel, where autosiz...Let's not even talk about Excel, where autosizing the cell to fit the text does no such thing, either for viewing on the screen or printing on the page.Stephanie Zvanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15182490110208080002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-3108876687361556352009-11-02T13:41:08.954-06:002009-11-02T13:41:08.954-06:00I'm trying to remember back to my digital pre-...I'm trying to remember back to my digital pre-press days here... I recall being surprised when opening a Word document on Windows and having the whole thing reflow when I chose a different printer. I recall that not happening in Word for Mac. I think the difference was in <b>document</b> defaults versus <b>printer</b> defaults, though it may have been more closely related to PostScript versus whatever that-crap-is-that-Windows-uses-to-print.Ben Zvanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12985694779451169100noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-88899473491177573162009-11-01T19:22:19.748-06:002009-11-01T19:22:19.748-06:00So someone was expecting a psychic versino of MSWo...So someone was expecting a psychic versino of MSWord which knows anything and everything about your printer and miraculously compensates? Ahahahaha!<br /><br />It's surprising that this is still an issue. I had that problem back in 1998 and it's one big reason why I dumped all MS software in favor of free software. The university's UNIX (Solaris) servers printed things just fine and even Linux printed things fine (once you got the printer set up), but the MS print routines screwed up *most* of the time. I couldn't afford a Sun server back then so I was stuck with Linux + other free software. (The Debian Linux repository just looked so much better than the BSD offerings.)MadScientistnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-63561481250973299342009-10-30T19:11:24.693-05:002009-10-30T19:11:24.693-05:00@some guy:
That's... somewhat of a red herrin...@some guy:<br /><br />That's... somewhat of a red herring. Word would be better software if it gave consistent layouts than if it didn't, all other things being equal. This is true whether or not the format is a moving target for others.<br /><br />I like better software.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-56228242462428375182009-10-30T15:08:48.682-05:002009-10-30T15:08:48.682-05:00But that's just the problem. MS Office is the...But that's just the problem. MS Office is the <i>defacto</i> standard. So few people use other office software that it's assumed everyone has a copy of Microsoft Office. In high school, when I told a teacher I didn't have a copy of MS Office on my computer (I didn't know about Open Office at this time), he told me to pirate it.NoobixCubehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17150854195016438207noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-83655649839517302272009-10-30T10:22:04.188-05:002009-10-30T10:22:04.188-05:00evaned:
> I also kinda wonder how susceptable D...evaned:<br /><em>> I also kinda wonder how susceptable DOCX is to this sort of problem relative to DOC. I sort of hope that MS took the oppontunity to start with a mostly-clean slate</em><br /><br />It's not like Office is exactly standard, anyway. Even if MS did start with a clean slate with DOCX, <a href="http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009102810072196" rel="nofollow">they keep changing it</a> so who knows how it's going to end up.some guyhttp://www.google.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-10037533162869056132009-10-29T22:58:14.718-05:002009-10-29T22:58:14.718-05:00Bah... and sorry to spam, but I should add a discl...Bah... and sorry to spam, but I should add a disclaimer that I don't have firsthand knowledge of what exactly Word is doing; I'm just trying to infer based on what I know about the API and Word's behavior. I could be wrong about just about anything I say there.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-54814233006862713832009-10-29T22:54:40.514-05:002009-10-29T22:54:40.514-05:00BTW JH, I pretty much agree with you (and disagree...BTW JH, I pretty much agree with you (and disagree with BillR) about the reasonableness of Word doing this.<br /><br />As BillR admits, PDFs virtually always come out the same; I disagree that there's something about PDFs vs. a Word processor document that means that <i>significant stuff</i> like where line and page breaks happen should vary depending on the printer.<br /><br />(I also kinda wonder how susceptable DOCX is to this sort of problem relative to DOC. I sort of hope that MS took the oppontunity to start with a mostly-clean slate, but I've not heard of anything to indicate whether or not this is true.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-18021420088628152632009-10-29T22:49:08.517-05:002009-10-29T22:49:08.517-05:00If that's really how Windows works, I think I&...<i>If that's really how Windows works, I think I'm even less of a fan.</i><br /><br />It's not Windows's fault; Word is <b>doing extra work to be stupid</b>. (I'm not sure if that's better or worse. :-))<br /><br />It's been many years since I've read about programming printing on Windows, so it's possible I'm flat out wrong about this or it's changed, but I'm 99% sure that at least one common way of doing printing is to use the exact same GDI calls programs use to draw to the screen. GDI is the graphics... device... interface? Whatever; it's the API that programs use to draw stuff to the screen. It's got about what you'd expect from any drawing API; you can draw lines given the coordinates of the endpoints, you draw circles given a circle and diameter (or maybe the bounding box), and you can draw text given the coordinate where you want it to start and information about the font.<br /><br />These exact same primitives are what you use to draw to the printer. All you need to do print what you have drawn to the screen is obtain a GDI handle to an object representing a printer and pass it to your normal drawing function. (Maybe to be useful the drawing function has to be a little more aware of the coordinates its using so it doesn't come out tiny or something like that, but setting up a coordinate transformation first probably takes care of most of that.)<br /><br />If you want to print what you have on the screen this is way easier than figuring out how to generate the corresponding postscript; if you want to draw something substantially different, it's probably no harder in general.<br /><br />(Note that I'm not saying Linux <i>doesn't</i> work this way; for all I know Qt and GTK make printing stuff you draw to the screen as seemless as Windows does. I don't really care for purposes of this discussion; I'm just explaining what Windows does.)<br /><br />However, what GDI <i>doesn't</i> do is any of the fancy layout stuff that you need to actually lay out a document. I'm not even entirely sure it'll do wordwrapping at a certain width, though it might. All that's done by Word.<br /><br />Basically what is going on is -- for some reason -- Word is <i>specifically querying properties of the printer</i> and changing its layout accordingly. As I said before, it's doing extra work to be dumb.<br /><br />(I've seen this topic come up a couple times before, e.g. on Slashdot. I don't recall seeing any particularly good explanations for why Word does what it does.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650649138973583402.post-31847304454178816672009-10-29T22:27:08.634-05:002009-10-29T22:27:08.634-05:00The "WSYSIWYG" has always been an approx...The "WSYSIWYG" has always been an approximation on every platform regardless of the display and print rendering design. One possible exception is the original Macintosh and its ImageWriter printer.<br /><br />I encounter documents that do not print as they appear on screen whether it's a Macintosh, Linux, Solaris or Windows, and regardless of rendering language, including PostScript.<br /><br />When the document is a test print, I have to determine why it doesn't print correctly. It almost always comes down to truncation error and a boundary condition in either the:<br />a. transformation of the document by the application into the print rendering language, by far the most common error, or<br />b. rendering the image into the print bitmap, a problem that occurs either in the driver or in the printer.<br />Often, just changing the margins or a cell dimension to a slightly different value is enough to fix the problem even for documents printed on different platforms.<br /><br />If rendering to the display and to the printed media are both driven by the same language than one has the highest probability of WYSIWYG. That's why the document displayed by a PDF reader almost always match the printed document. However, it's still possible for some PDF documents to be rendered poorly (downright fuzzily) on screen. I've yet to ascertain why that occurs but I do know that turning off anti-aliasing often resolves the issue for black and white documents.<br /><br />Compatibility of Office documents across the differing versions of Microsoft Office and platforms is a completely separate issue. My comments here apply only to differing versions of Microsoft Office.<br /><br />Saving an Office document to an older format does not make the document share the same print or screen appearance with the version saving the document. All that the save does is remove features that would otherwise prevent the older version from opening the document.<br /><br />To maximize backward compatibility with other Office versions, it is necessary to set the Compatibilty setting in Microsoft Office to the values that correspond to the older versions, then create the document, and save it in the old format.<br /><br />Even then, print time options that are controlled by the user and not by the document, e.g. not stored in the document and restored, can cause dramatically different prints. One of the more common and least expected setting is to print "hidden" text. Even if the document author has not marked any text as hidden, Microsoft Word does. Displaying the hidden text will alter how tables and text are presented.<br /><br />But explaining some of the reasons why Microsoft Office documents don't print the same across version and platforms and how to prevent it doesn't excuse the problem. The morale of the story is that it doesn't matter on which platform you create a document, if you want print portability, you'll need to convert it to PDF and you'll need to check the conversion either with an PDF reader or better yet, printing to a consumer printer.BillRnoreply@blogger.com