Though I am not from IIT but one feasibility issue which i see in your suggestion is that OpenOffice does not retain the original page and font formatting for documents created with Microsoft Office and vice versa. This loss of formatting is even more evident in case of the new Office 2007 .docx format files. As most documents brought for printing would be MS Word files, installing Linux would affect the business and reputation of the shopkeeper among unaware students which I'm sure would be quite a lot in numbers.
So before installing Linux in the shops, the logical flow of action would be to encourage the use of open standards for document creation amongst students. Even if some of the students are initially reluctant to switch to Linux, the use of OpenOffice for creating .odt files should be encouraged. For porting the documents from one system to the other, there is nothing better than the .pdf format. The use of all these open standards needs to be encouraged. Regards, Tanay Mathpal Assistant Systems Engineer Tata Consultancy Services Thiruvananthapuram Twitter: @tanamania On 10/23/10, Naren Bharatwaj <[email protected]> wrote: > Just got a random thought on why not help install Linux in all hostels where > photocopy/printing facility is available. I've had to print some documents > and when I take the content in a pendrive, it invariably ends up infected > with virus. I hope there'll be students from every hostel in this mailing > list. We can go in groups and encourage the guy who runs the photocopy > facility to install linux by highlighting the advantages of linux. According > to my observation, he uses the system only for printing documents (word > documents/PDF files). > > Any ideas on this are welcome. > > Naren Bharatwaj > > -- > l...@iitd - http://tinyurl.com/ycueutm > -- Sent from my mobile device -- l...@iitd - http://tinyurl.com/ycueutm
