[ubuntu-uk] Microsoft proprietary file types?

[Liam Proven]

On 20 May 2011 16:48, Jim Price <d1version at hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 20/05/11 15:15, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> On 20 May 2011 00:01, Daniel Case<danielcase10 at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi guys,
>>>
>>> I'm a web designer and host, and I often get clients email with .doc,
>>> .ppx and even .docx nowadays.... the question is, what should I be
>>> doing about these people? I often send an email back asking them if
>>> they would mind sending in an open format so I can open it without
>>> problems, but I have had one person cancel a job over it (extreme, I
>>> know, apparently I was wasting time..) so the question is how can I
>>> educate these people, especially if they are willing to cancel a
>>> project over it? (I make my income from this stuff!)
>>
>> More or less what Popey said, actually, but I would like to make a
>> more detailed suggestion.
>>
>> You don't need to actually spend any money to achieve this, or most of
>> this.
>>
>> What you do is:
>
> <snips good, pragmatic ideas>

Ta! :¬)

>> That's it. Using all freeware, you can now view the files in native
>> Microsoft applications, without a Windows licence or binaries or
>> anything.
>>
>> OK, true, it is not all FOSS - not FOSS at all, in fact - but it's
>> legal, legit and works. I prefer to think of it as a small gesture of
>> defiance, myself.
>
> I would suggest one further idea to that- add the Ghostscript PDF printer
> driver so you can print any documents to a PDF file from the MS viewers and
> use those PDFs with native apps in Ubuntu. Gimp, Openoffice/LibreOffice
> (Writer and Draw with the PDF import extension) and assorted command line
> utils can do things with PDFs which Windows users would be envious of if
> they didn't think they were impossible.

Excellent idea. I didn't know about this - I use OpenOffice to create
PDFs, and that does me, but that is a great suggestion.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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