On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 22:43, David Christian Berg wrote: > Can't you ask your school to distill it to a pdf? I mean I assume that > in China everybody has the Acrobat distiller in some pirated version :) > I just was in Thailand and was shocked with how openly pirated software > was sold and used.
Frankly, I'm not sure Acrobat could handle the files either if they're as bad as described. > (this is actually one of the big threats to OpenSource: piracy. If > people get proprietary software for free, why bother using open source?) For one thing, because it's sometimes better :-) The POST Newspapers, my employer, use Adobe Acrobat 5 and Acrobat Professional 6 for our regular PostScript to PDF conversion. Despite this, we use GhostScript and in fact increasingly rely on it as a critical tool in our workflow. Whenever Acrobat Distiller chokes on a PostScript file (not infrequent, I assure you), we feed it through GhostScript and it happily processes it. We test the resulting file with PitStop then send it off to the printers - works a treat. On one recent occasion GhostScript saved us from likely missing press deadline. Those who work in the newspaper industry know just how expensive it can be to miss that deadline - let's just say you really, REALLY don't want to go over deadline. We are currently looking into switching over to using GhostScript for regular production. It generates significantly larger PDFs from our jobs, but does so much more quickly and reliably than Distiller. Being able to run it on the very fast core Linux server is an additional attraction. If you don't have gs 8.3x, I strongly advise you to get hold of it. It's fantastic. Another reason to use OSS is flexibility. It is because of the flexibility offered by having the code to the software and the right to modify it (or pay someone else to) that I am interested in using Scribus at the POST eventually. I think there's rather more of an attraction to OSS than just price, though that's definitely a factor. For example, if MS gave Win2k3 server away for free, I'd still be using a Linux server for our network core. -- Craig Ringer
