Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

>> Again, this isn't too practical these days (with BB anywhere).
>>
>
> BB?
>

Sorry, I did not have my 1984 hat on. Big brother.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 00:45, Oron Peled  wrote:
> Regretfully, your noble suggestion does not give any significant
> protection, for various reason (IANAL):
>  * Patents: control *use* and not implementation. So if you write
>   "patent infringing" code, you have no problem as long as you
>   don't run it. However, your users are at a risk.
>   (as a demo, see how MS threaten OEM's for Android use and not Google)
>
>  * You may think about idemnifying your users (i.e: promise to financially
>   back their damages), but this isn't a reasonable option unless you
>   have spare cache in the 5-6 digits range (USA, in dollars).
>
>  * Copyrights: this is a lesser risk, since we know free software
>   developers do not copy/derive code from MS. However, even in
>   this case -- if you are sued for copyright infringment, there's
>   nothing that protect your users from being sued also (In the USA
>   the MPAA/RIAA reminds everybody of this fact -- they sue the
>   end users even if they downloaded infringing content from other
>   "infringing party", like youtube/pirate-bay/etc.)
>

Thank you for your insight. I had figured that it is the distribution
"making available" the code which could be construed as infringing.


>> That means that the code will be released under GLP but the copyright
>> remains with me, not you. But I think you guys know me, my intention
>> is only to protect the real author, not to profit from the code.
>
> Profit from free software is not a shame. On the contrary, the client
> gets the program he asked for and as a bonus it's free software --
> So the client gets better value for money.
>
> That's why I'm really sorry to hit your inovative bussiness model.
> I wish it would be feasible.
>

No business model, I had not intended on making any money. Quite the
opposite, I had intending on taking a risk with no financial
incentive.


>> ...The true author can remain anonymous if he wishes.
>
> Again, this isn't too practical these days (with BB anywhere).
>

BB?


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Tuesday, 21 בFebruary 2012 17:56:15 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> If anyone is worried about releasing code developed from information
> gleaned in the MS documentation, then I can "contract" the work, and I
> release it. Therefore it is me who would be sued. I am willing to be
> the scapegoat and take that chance.

Regretfully, your noble suggestion does not give any significant
protection, for various reason (IANAL):
 * Patents: control *use* and not implementation. So if you write
   "patent infringing" code, you have no problem as long as you
   don't run it. However, your users are at a risk.
   (as a demo, see how MS threaten OEM's for Android use and not Google)

 * You may think about idemnifying your users (i.e: promise to financially
   back their damages), but this isn't a reasonable option unless you
   have spare cache in the 5-6 digits range (USA, in dollars).

 * Copyrights: this is a lesser risk, since we know free software
   developers do not copy/derive code from MS. However, even in
   this case -- if you are sued for copyright infringment, there's
   nothing that protect your users from being sued also (In the USA
   the MPAA/RIAA reminds everybody of this fact -- they sue the
   end users even if they downloaded infringing content from other
   "infringing party", like youtube/pirate-bay/etc.)

> That means that the code will be released under GLP but the copyright
> remains with me, not you. But I think you guys know me, my intention
> is only to protect the real author, not to profit from the code.

Profit from free software is not a shame. On the contrary, the client
gets the program he asked for and as a bonus it's free software --
So the client gets better value for money.

That's why I'm really sorry to hit your inovative bussiness model.
I wish it would be feasible.

> ...The true author can remain anonymous if he wishes.

Again, this isn't too practical these days (with BB anywhere).

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

If anyone is worried about releasing code developed from information
gleaned in the MS documentation, then I can "contract" the work, and I
release it. Therefore it is me who would be sued. I am willing to be
the scapegoat and take that chance.

That means that the code will be released under GLP but the copyright
remains with me, not you. But I think you guys know me, my intention
is only to protect the real author, not to profit from the code. I
will be nothing more than proxy, and I will not rerelease the code
under any other license. The true author can remain anonymous if he
wishes.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Monday, 20 בFebruary 2012 22:30:54 Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Oron Peled wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > > Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
> > > formats are documented, even the older binary formats.
> > 
> > Care to point us where it is?
> > 
> > PS: if this "documentation" is encapsulated in something that
> > can only be read after signing some NDA and/or other legal
> > MS stuff -- don't bother, such documentation is equivalent
> > to internal MS documentation -- I.e: it is not usefull to
> > anyone else.
> 
> Dotan gave the links earlier today:
> 
>   > Here are the pre-2007 formats:
>   > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx
>   > 
>   > And here are the current versions:
>   > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx
> 
> Amazingly, not only do you not have to sign any NDA, the documents (at
> least those I looked at) say that your are free to copy and
> redistiribute them. Perhaps even more amazingly, they are in PDF format,

I think you'll be less thrilled after reading my response to his mail.
In short:
 * The documents are free, but the contained information is not.
 * Their appearance (e.g: PDF, etc.) is not surprising if you know
   they were released during the corrupted OOXML campaign.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

I don't normally rely on Wikipedia being an authoritative source, but this
article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise

seems to have links that you might want to visit if you are really
interested (disclaimer: I am not really interested, so I didn't do any
further research), in particular regarding FLOSS/GPL/whatever
compatibility. Interestingly, MS-OSP seems to be a patent license.

After a very cursory glance it seems that it covers older formats (doc,
ppt, etc., rather than docx, pptx, and so on), and one should indeed be
careful. The way I read it is that if all you want to do is create an
editor that uses the Word format it's OK, but if you want to use the
technology for something else then you may get sued. Where the line is is
absolutely unclear to me.

IANAL.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Monday, 20 בFebruary 2012 17:24:20 Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > Here are the pre-2007 formats:
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx
> > 
> > And here are the current versions:
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx
> 
> Amazing. These didn't exist previously!

MS "released" them few years ago as part of their OOXML plot.
This context would explain the rest.

> It appears that people may legally use these documents, and even copy
> them.

Oops, be carefull here. I just looked at one of them (Excel 97-2007)
and the first sentence on the first page (after the cover page) says:
  "This specification is provided under the Microsoft Open
   Specification Promise." (link to MS OSP)

If this doesn't ring a bell, have a look at what lawyers (not paid by MS)
had to say about this:
   http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/osp-gpl.html
  "...Irrevocable but Only for Now..."
  "...The OSP Covers Specifications, Not Code..."

> So, I guess there's no reason to say any more that these formats are
> undocumented.

Not really, unless "I'll tell you my secrets and then sue you" is some
new documentation format ;-)

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Oron Peled wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
> > formats are documented, even the older binary formats.
> 
> Care to point us where it is?
> 
> PS: if this "documentation" is encapsulated in something that
> can only be read after signing some NDA and/or other legal
> MS stuff -- don't bother, such documentation is equivalent
> to internal MS documentation -- I.e: it is not usefull to
> anyone else.

Dotan gave the links earlier today:

> Here are the pre-2007 formats:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx
> 
> And here are the current versions:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx

Amazingly, not only do you not have to sign any NDA, the documents (at
least those I looked at) say that your are free to copy and
redistiribute them. Perhaps even more amazingly, they are in PDF format,
not any of Microsoft's own format.

Very nice (though I still prefer OpenOffice ;-)).

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Sunday, 19 בFebruary 2012 23:00:11 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 20:22, Oron Peled  wrote:
> > So either supporting a public documented ISO standard isn't harder
> > than supporting many variants of proprietary and undocumented file
> > file format, or... draw your own conclusion.
> 
> Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
> formats are documented, even the older binary formats.

Care to point us where it is?

PS: if this "documentation" is encapsulated in something that
can only be read after signing some NDA and/or other legal
MS stuff -- don't bother, such documentation is equivalent
to internal MS documentation -- I.e: it is not usefull to
anyone else.


-- 
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o...@actcom.co.il  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
You know, someone once told me that New York has more lawyers than people.
 -- Warren Buffett, Fortune, 1999

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 16:10, Shlomi Fish  wrote:
> there's also this (with a link at the top):
>
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
>
> The licence may be problematic.
>

Thanks, Shlomi, that is a great link. If anyone knows of an available
internet-facing Windows Server instance where one might translate MS
Office files to PDF, I would love to know about it. I would even join
a pool of people to maintain such a server for a reasonable monthly
cost.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi,

On Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:29:41 +0200
Yedidyah Bar-David  wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:40:58AM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
> > shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > > Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
> > > formats are documented, even the older binary formats.
> > 
> > Where is the ".doc" format documented?
> > 
> > I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search
> > engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like
> > trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation.
> > The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd.
> > 
> > What documentation do you refer to?
> 
> According to Wikipedia, it's partially documented. I did not follow the
> links inside:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOC_(computing)#Specification

there's also this (with a link at the top):

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

The licence may be problematic.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Here are the pre-2007 formats:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx
> 
> And here are the current versions:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx

Amazing. These didn't exist previously!
The document I looked at (the .ppt format) says that "This specification is
provided under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.". Interesting.

It appears that people may legally use these documents, and even copy
them. And it seems that the document indeed contains all the
information I once needed when I wrote that text extractor. Although it
still would have taken me days to understand this bizarre format, at
least I wouldn't have had to guess what all the strange records meant.

So, I guess there's no reason to say any more that these formats are
undocumented.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:40, Nadav Har'El  wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
> shift to non-propriety documents formats":
>> Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
>> formats are documented, even the older binary formats.
>
> Where is the ".doc" format documented?
>
> I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search
> engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like
> trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation.
> The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd.
>
> What documentation do you refer to?
>

Here are the pre-2007 formats:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx

And here are the current versions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:40:58AM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
> shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
> > formats are documented, even the older binary formats.
> 
> Where is the ".doc" format documented?
> 
> I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search
> engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like
> trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation.
> The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd.
> 
> What documentation do you refer to?

According to Wikipedia, it's partially documented. I did not follow the
links inside:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOC_(computing)#Specification
-- 
Didi


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
> formats are documented, even the older binary formats.

Where is the ".doc" format documented?

I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search
engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like
trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation.
The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd.

What documentation do you refer to?

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 20:22, Oron Peled  wrote:
> So either supporting a public documented ISO standard isn't harder
> than supporting many variants of proprietary and undocumented file
> file format, or... draw your own conclusion.
>

Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx
formats are documented, even the older binary formats.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Friday, 17 בFebruary 2012 14:56:20 Diego Iastrubni wrote:
> My brief conclusion of this experiment is that MSOffice 2010 supports
> ODF 1.1 as much as LibreOffice supports *.doc files.

So either supporting a public documented ISO standard isn't harder
than supporting many variants of proprietary and undocumented file
file format, or... draw your own conclusion.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 14:56, Diego Iastrubni  wrote:
> In MsOffice I created a "test 1,2,3" document (in Hebrew, RTL), saved as ODT,
> and opened in LibreOffice. File loaded, directionality not working.
>

That is likely an OpenOffice / LibreOffice bug:

Writer saves text alignment of RTL paragraph not according to the ODF
specification
OOo: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=105270
LO: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37128

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 02:56:20PM +0200, Diego Iastrubni wrote:

> I installed Windows 7, and Office from MS. I also installed the latest 
> version 
> of LibreOffice. 
> 
> In MsOffice I created a "test 1,2,3" document (in Hebrew, RTL), saved as ODT, 
> and opened in LibreOffice. File loaded, directionality not working.
> 
> Created the same document in LibreOffice, saved and tried opening it in 
> MSWord. 
> This failed, as probably MSOfffice 2010 supports only ODF1.1 and LibreOffice 
> supports only 1.1.

"And LibreOffice generates ODF 1.2 files", right?

Options: Load/Save => General => ODF Format version

Anyway, isn't ODF 1.2 backward-compatible with older version of ODF by design?

Also note that the major incompatibility mentioned in that article was
in the spreadsheet format.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Diego Iastrubni]

> From my experience there is no problem opening in office 2007 docx written
> in office 2010.
> 
> > BTW, if you think they improved ODF support you are dead wrong.
> > In the last years all ODF supporting programs were adapting
> > to the (now approved) ODF-1.2 -- care to check where is MS-Office
> > in this respect?
> > 
> > But we knew this would happen, didn't we?
> 
> I will try it myself, before I judge. But yes, very expected.
> 
> http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try

I installed Windows 7, and Office from MS. I also installed the latest version 
of LibreOffice. 

In MsOffice I created a "test 1,2,3" document (in Hebrew, RTL), saved as ODT, 
and opened in LibreOffice. File loaded, directionality not working.

Created the same document in LibreOffice, saved and tried opening it in MSWord. 
This failed, as probably MSOfffice 2010 supports only ODF1.1 and LibreOffice 
supports only 1.1.

New test was downloading http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-
v1.1.odt and opening it. The document opened in MSWord 2010 and LibreOffice 
3.5. 
The document length in pages was different in both applications. I then saved 
the document and loaded the document in LibreOffice - now the document size in 
LibreOffice was different (3 different page count, yes).

My brief conclusion of this experiment is that MSOffice 2010 supports ODF 1.1 
as 
much as LibreOffice supports *.doc files.

If anyone wants to send me ODF files for testing, I can send him PDF files as 
respond, hoping that this will satisfy your curiosity.

One good thing that I can say about OSOffice, is that the loading and saving is 
done incrementally and faster then LibreOffice. LibreOffice felt like it was 
going 
to explode while "editing" the document, and MSOffice felt quite good. 

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Diego Iastrubni]

On יום חמישי 16 פברואר 2012 12:19:18 you wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 בFebruary 2012 21:47:02 Diego Iastrubni wrote:
> > On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote:
> > > You can find an example of this (refering to ODS):
> > >   http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05
> > 
> > Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of
> > propietary software stopped 3 years ago?
> 
> Nope. It just created more incompatible formats...
> (MS-Office-2010 format is different from MS-Office-2007)
From my experience there is no problem opening in office 2007 docx written in 
office 2010. 

> BTW, if you think they improved ODF support you are dead wrong.
> In the last years all ODF supporting programs were adapting
> to the (now approved) ODF-1.2 -- care to check where is MS-Office
> in this respect?
> 
> But we knew this would happen, didn't we?
I will try it myself, before I judge. But yes, very expected.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Wednesday, 15 בFebruary 2012 21:47:02 Diego Iastrubni wrote:
> On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote:
> > You can find an example of this (refering to ODS):
> >   http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05
> 
> Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of 
> propietary software stopped 3 years ago?

Nope. It just created more incompatible formats...
(MS-Office-2010 format is different from MS-Office-2007)

BTW, if you think they improved ODF support you are dead wrong.
In the last years all ODF supporting programs were adapting
to the (now approved) ODF-1.2 -- care to check where is MS-Office
in this respect?

But we knew this would happen, didn't we?

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Michael Vasiliev]

On 02/15/2012 09:47 PM, Diego Iastrubni wrote:

On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote:

You can find an example of this (refering to ODS):
   http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05

Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of
propietary software stopped 3 years ago?

Did you check the status on modern office suits, or will you just link it
forever, being ignorant and thinking what is the best for you and not reality?

(crap, every time I say something rationable and smart a kitty dies, please
stop).
Diego, please. I think you're not doing justice to your own cause by 
writing that kind of meaningless flame mail. Honestly, I did not quite 
understand what that reply was about. The only thing I got is these blog 
posts are outdated. What have changed since then and how does that 
affect us? I think that building a case beyond throwing facts at the 
problem by adding some semantic connections and logic reasoning could 
aid in better conveying your message to us. Could you explain further in 
a calm and clear manner?


--
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Linux-IL Moderator

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Diego Iastrubni]

On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote:
> You can find an example of this (refering to ODS):
>   http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05

Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of 
propietary software stopped 3 years ago?

Did you check the status on modern office suits, or will you just link it 
forever, being ignorant and thinking what is the best for you and not reality?

(crap, every time I say something rationable and smart a kitty dies, please 
stop).

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Michael Vasiliev]

On 02/09/2012 12:54 AM, Dotan Cohen wrote:

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 22:09, Michael Vasiliev  wrote:

I, for one, use quite a lot of
code long abandoned by it's authors.



I knew that I'm not the last KDE 3 lover out there!


Well it would be funny, but FreeBSD, for example, still ships KDE 3.5 
along with 4, as quite a lot of people prefer it over the rather bloated 
next major.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 22:09, Michael Vasiliev  wrote:
> I, for one, use quite a lot of
> code long abandoned by it's authors.
>


I knew that I'm not the last KDE 3 lover out there!


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Michael Vasiliev]

On 02/05/2012 10:26 PM, geoffrey mendelson wrote:


On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote:


yuck!



So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to
reduce MS/Office sales?
OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too.
Bad because it's "dumping", a practice banned by the WTO? I'm somewhat 
skeptic about the validity of an argument that it gives an unfair 
advantage to the side that does not intend to sell their product, but to 
give it away for free. The side being the OO developer community. Of 
course, for Sun it's a tactic to undermine the MS profit stream, I 
agree. However, in case when, if not by intention, but by result it 
aligns surprisingly well with the direction large companies rarely take 
-- the benefit of all (literate) mankind, I don't mind at all.


Before you go "you must be anti FOSS" on me, bear in mind there were
many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or
two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice).
Crushed in the same way BSD or GNU Hurd are crushed by the Linux kernel? 
I'm having trouble subscribing to that kind of POV. FOSS projects don't 
compete in the same way proprietary products do. A piece of open and 
free code lives as long as there is someone to maintain it. I, for one, 
use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:55, geoffrey mendelson > I see it
differently. Not because I like it, or agree with it, but because I
> am a cynic and believe the Israeli mindset to be different. I see it that
> they will say that they have a limited budget and the cost of providing the
> service to Windows users is something they must do, but to pay the extra
> money for FOSS support is a losing bet, as they don't know if anyone uses
> it, and they can use Windows (and M/S products) instead.
>

Presenting DOC/ PDF as Windows / FOSS is a false dichotomy. Presenting
it DOC / PDF as "works only on expensive or pirated software" / "works
on all computers and mobile devices" is the key.


> If they want to make their service more accessible, then they would spend
> what little money they have on iPod/iPhone/iPad apps and possibly Android
> ones.
>

See above, PDF will support those devices already.

> With that in mind, I think that the place to lobby for increased FOSS
> accessibility is the ministry of Education who controls these things, while
> private schools are just not going to have the money.
> :-(
>



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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 16:38, Meir Michanie  wrote:
> Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site
> named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to
> run windows in vmware,...

The tech support representative for Ofek says that the site will soon
support Firefox. Check back in a few weeks, and if it doesn't work
then write to them.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 8, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:


This is a perfect time to explain:
1) They cannot have everything they want
2) Life is unfair
3) Some people (the management of that site) are irresponsible and  
hurt others


That is how my 5 and 3 year old daughters would hear it in this  
situation.




I see it differently. Not because I like it, or agree with it, but  
because I am a cynic and believe the Israeli mindset to be different.  
I see it that they will say that they have a limited budget and the  
cost of providing the service to Windows users is something they must  
do, but to pay the extra money for FOSS support is a losing bet, as  
they don't know if anyone uses it, and they can use Windows (and M/S  
products) instead.


If they want to make their service more accessible, then they would  
spend what little money they have on iPod/iPhone/iPad apps and  
possibly Android ones.


With that in mind, I think that the place to lobby for increased FOSS  
accessibility is the ministry of Education who controls these things,  
while private schools are just not going to have the money.

:-(

Geoff.
--
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 02:43, Oron Peled  wrote:
>> If not there
>> are some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the
>> OpenDocument formats.
>
> There was a Sun plugin, which was covered in the above interoperability
> paper, but:
>  * It needed some registration to use (so I didn't test it)
>  * I'm not sure if still exists after Oracle bought Sun.
>

It now costs $99.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

2012/2/5 Mordechai Behar :
> Those are just developer tools, and even then, only a few institutions in
> Israel are accepted as viable places of study that will allow a student to
> download the software.
> A better system is the MSDAA (Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance) which
> allows a student who is registered for specific courses in specific
> institutions to download and use nearly every Microsoft application,
> including the actual operating system and office suite. However, to the best
> of my knowledge this is only available to compsci and computer engineering
> students at Hebrew University.

In mechanical engineering at the Technion we had access to MSDAA, but
Office was not included. Everything else, including Windows 7, was.


> The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted software,
> I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS.

I cannot find details about this. If you can, I would love to know. My
wife is a therapist and gets some Department of Education benefits,
such as a reduced interest loan at Mosad.


> I think that the length and speed of growth of this thread points to just
> how frustrated we all are at the current situation. So why don't we change
> it? We happen to have Hamakor, a registered nonprofit organization to
> promote the use of free and open source software in Israel. So why not start
> some kind of campaign? A public message? People are still riled up about the
> social protests of the past summer, we could ride that wave.
>

I've been active for years, writing to websites and other entities.
Instead of organising, we are better off being disparate in my
opinion. If Ofek receives a letter per week requesting Firefox
support, that is more convincing than a letter from some unknown
organisation complaining about freedom.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 16:38, Meir Michanie  wrote:
> Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site
> named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to
> run windows in vmware,...

Thanks, I just wrote to them.

> another site that kids have access for free if they login through ofek
> is brainpop.
> It's hard to explain to your kids to suffer their lack of access to
> those site for a noble purpose of using OSS.
>

This is a perfect time to explain:
1) They cannot have everything they want
2) Life is unfair
3) Some people (the management of that site) are irresponsible and hurt others

That is how my 5 and 3 year old daughters would hear it in this situation.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 15:52, Micha  wrote:
> I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on
> some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does
> ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return).
>

For this you need to define a custom header / footer for the page. Is
this easier / more intuitive in MS Office? How is it done there?

> Neither can do proper math if their life depended on it, or make it
> cross platform (openoffice can't handle microsoft equations and vice versa).
>

MS Office equations are not cross-platform. Actually, when importing
MSO >= 2007 into older MSO products, the equations are transformed
into images and are no longer editable either.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt :
> How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which Word
> is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the creator
> could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of course,
> the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit...
>

HTML is not a file format. What would become of the images and CSS files?


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland :
> of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is
> the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice
> and Google docs (imported).

Boaz, please send to me the document so that I can file OOo / LO bugs.

Thanks.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:23, geoffrey mendelson
 wrote:
> It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that a
> crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by the
> school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were capabilities
> that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not provide for Hebrew.
>
> I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he is a
> special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not unique.
>

Please let me know what these features are, so that we can file OOo /
LO bugs on them. You can call me, though I do not claim to _speak_
English as well as I write it:
054-7881700


> I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both Microsoft
> Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good Hebrew support) and
> OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew formatting. Mac users have to
> buy "niche" packages which do, but they do not run on any other platform.
>

Hebrew Open Office has some bugs, but nothing terrible. So does MS
Office. I use OOo in Hebrew very often. Feel free to direct to me any
OOo users that have trouble.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland :
> I bet it cannot read my teacher's  document!: a table full of oversized
> text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that
> never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear
> somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as
> well!
>
> :-)
>
> oh boy. I had to release some steam!... :-)
>

If that file does not open well in Open Office, then send it to me and
I will file bugs on it to get OOo / LO fixed. Note that the document
will be made public.

Thanks.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

2012/2/5 Etzion Bar-Noy :
> Because most households in israel do not buy their office...
>
> It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school headmaster does
> not assume that either. He/she knows most people just "have" their office
> installed, and they care nothing about it.
>

Then the argument is that sending .docx files encourages piracy.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Sunday, 5 בFebruary 2012 19:37:05 Shlomi Fish wrote:
> I believe recent versions of Microsoft Office support ODT (I don't know how
> perfectly). At least I saw it in their file formats' drop box.

Stay away from this, it's a trap. Their implementation (unsurprisingly)
generates ODF that isn't readable by any other ODF application.

You can find an example of this (refering to ODS):
  http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05

> If not there
> are some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the
> OpenDocument formats.

There was a Sun plugin, which was covered in the above interoperability
paper, but:
 * It needed some registration to use (so I didn't test it)
 * I'm not sure if still exists after Oracle bought Sun.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oron Peled]

On Sunday, 5 בFebruary 2012 15:52:45 Micha wrote:
> I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on
> some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does
> ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return).

Huh? Page-styles are your friends. You can defined separate page-styles
(e.g: cover-page, regular page, landscape page, etc.) and apply these
styles to any page range you want.

Generally, OOo style handling is very good and used to be a lot better
then MS-word. It's been years I haven't use MS-word, so I cannot say
if they closed the gap in this space.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 10:26:51PM +0200, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
>
> On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote:
>
>> yuck!
>
>
> So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to  
> reduce MS/Office sales?
> OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too.
>
> Before you go "you must be anti FOSS" on me, bear in mind there were  
> many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or  
> two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice).

Nope. AbiSuite never made anything more that Abiword. The "GNOME Office"
has indeed lost steam due to OpenOffice's availability (but that was
only after the free (as in OpenOffice.org) version has become available.

KOffice carried on and still does (through recently forked/execed as
Caligra Office). SiagOffice was probably never a real contender and has
only managed to gain some popularity because nothing else was available.

On the other hand, Applixware and CorelOffice have fallen on the wayside
(for Corel: the Linux port). There are still rumoured to be one or two
reasonable proprietary office suites for Linux not based on OO.o .

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

Nobody said that M$ is the root of evil and Sun is the source of all good.

Even if the tactics and ways of M$ and Sun are equally ugly, and I really
can't answer on that, the key difference is that Sun is pushing a product
that first and foremost promotes open standards and that is *good*. As
longs as their biz ways are not truly sickening, I think that its better
than the same approach taken by M$ - but to push a closed
source, irreplaceable product that further enhance their dominance not due
to technological supremacy.

I have absolutely no warm feelings about Sun. Its just that open standards
(ODT in this case) is in the right direction, and it happens that Sun is
pushing in that direction as well.

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 10:26 PM, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote:
>
>  yuck!
>>
>
>
> So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to reduce
> MS/Office sales?
> OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too.
>
> Before you go "you must be anti FOSS" on me, bear in mind there were many
> true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or two) and
> so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice).
>
>
>
> Geoff.
>
> --
> Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
> My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote:


yuck!



So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to  
reduce MS/Office sales?

OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too.

Before you go "you must be anti FOSS" on me, bear in mind there were  
many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or  
two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice).



Geoff.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Micha wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to
> shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but
> > I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free
> > license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax
>
> This doesn't make any sense. Like I said, virtually everyone in the
> country either has school-aged children, or can easily find one - so who
> *won't* get a free MS license if this was the deal?
>
> Last time I checked, there were deals for *teachers*, but not for kids
> or their families. So the teachers find it very convenient (and cheap)
> to use MS, and who cares that the kids' families need to buy all this
> expensive software, or alternatively break the law.
>

I happen to have more than 1 teacher in my family. That's exactly M$
tactics for "raising" the young generation to their interest: give the *
teachers* extremely cheap M$ licenses and that way enforce the "right"
educations for their students, who'll grow knowing as little as possible
about alternatives. About the price, I'm aware of an offer maybe 3-4 years
old - teachers got the latest Windows license at that time + full office
that cost back then more than 2K NIS, at... make your
bets!... - a little over 200nis. That's right! About
a magnitude of the real market price.
On that note its worth mentioning that its been said on Microsoft that "its
a marketing company that happens to sell software".
yuck!
Boaz.


>
> --
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> 2012,
> n...@math.technion.ac.il
> |-
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Writing software is like sex: One
> mistake
> http://nadav.harel.org.il   |and you have to support it forever.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 15:40:05 +0200
Boaz Rymland  wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt  wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 
> >
> >>
> >> of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal
> >> is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice
> >> and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a
> >> weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data
> >> within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work
> >> or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to
> >> be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users.
> >>
> >
> > How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which
> > Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the
> > creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of
> > course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit...
> >
> 
> I think that's not the best solution. I'd rather have the teacher spread
> documents as either links to google docs documents, ODT documents, or PDF,
> exported from those documents. I tend to think that the order described
> above is the desired order of preference, at least to my taste and line of
> thought. Google docs is the easiest and is portable anytime when google
> will change something on their side. ODT is more cumbersome (requires
> installation of OO on the systems used by the teachers) but is truly open
> format, lasting solution. 

I believe recent versions of Microsoft Office support ODT (I don't know how
perfectly). At least I saw it in their file formats' drop box. If not there are
some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the OpenDocument
formats.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 9:35 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:


This doesn't make any sense. Like I said, virtually everyone in the
country either has school-aged children, or can easily find one - so  
who

*won't* get a free MS license if this was the deal?



Why does that not make sense? The licenses are for student/home use  
not commercial use. It's actually good marketing because if everyone  
knows how to use Microsoft products they will want to use them at  
work. If they use them at work, they will want to use them at home.


The idea is to make the most profit, not sell the most copies. The  
most profit is made by having business buy a site license based upon  
the number of computers, not encouraging people to only buy one  
license for their home because it cost so much.


Geoff.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Micha wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift to 
non-propriety documents formats":
> I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but
> I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free
> license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax

This doesn't make any sense. Like I said, virtually everyone in the
country either has school-aged children, or can easily find one - so who
*won't* get a free MS license if this was the deal?

Last time I checked, there were deals for *teachers*, but not for kids
or their families. So the teachers find it very convenient (and cheap)
to use MS, and who cares that the kids' families need to buy all this
expensive software, or alternatively break the law.

-- 
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Writing software is like sex: One mistake
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |and you have to support it forever.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Tzafrir Cohen  wrote:

> > right, but don't forget that to in order to "read only"  a document, you
> > don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's
> link
> > you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going
> to
> > take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its
> > only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While
> > using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to
> > Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is
> a
> > NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier "marketing job" to do.
>
> Are you interested in a read-only or  read-write format?
>

Well, it depends: if I see good cooperation, openess and willingness to
"hear more", I'll introduce OO suite, as a more full solution that could be
used elsewhere in the school, that could be used by students to fill in
their exercises, etc.
If I wont feel such openness I'll try to push a minimal solution - just
replace that read only format to one that I can read (I lean toward Google
Docs and on second place PDF).


> While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if
> a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with
> another.
>
>
This is not a fight. Fighting will not achieve anything. Achieving
something with arm power is my last resort and I think I wont get there. At
worst, I'll try again sometime in the near future or re-think again (don't
forget - fighting is always possible and should be avoided as much as
possible).

Boaz
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 16:14:09 +
Tzafrir Cohen  wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 03:52:18PM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen  wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> > >
> > > > Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
> > > > yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
> > > > M$-Office substitute.
> > >
> > > In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google
> > > Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would 
> > > not
> > > have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact
> > > with school.
> > >
> > > [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives
> > > implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file,
> > > which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea.
> > 
> > right, but don't forget that to in order to "read only"  a document, you
> > don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link
> > you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to
> > take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its
> > only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While
> > using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to
> > Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a
> > NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier "marketing job" to do.
> 
> Are you interested in a read-only or  read-write format?
> 

I believe public Google Documents can be downloaded in OpenDocument format
without registration (did not try that), and they certainly can be placed under
licences that can be modified under certain conditions (e.g: Creative Commons
licences). Anyway, even Lawrence Lessig in http://remix.lessig.org/ does not
advocate the abolishment of read-only culture. There's a lot of content on the
Web out there that's not in wikis/etc., and that's OK because it's still
usable.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

> While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if
> a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with
> another.
> 



-- 
-
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Mordechai Behar]

2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt 

>
>
> 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 
>
> HTML>
>
>
>> I think that's not the best solution.
>>
>
> I agree. I use the opposite (HTML->doc) suggestion when i need to send
> something to someone who absolutely must have a Word doc, that's why i
> thought of it.
>
> What I didn't realize when I typed my suggestion was that Word 2010 now
> has "Save As PDF" built in. I don't think it was the case in the previous
> versions - I remember IT people setting up a fake "PDF printer", etc.
> Mordechai's post made me double-check... This is bound to be better than
> Word->HTML.
>

AFAIK Word 2007 had it too, and 2003 had an available, downloadable plugin.
But still, people insist on not using it.
We are indeed a stiff-necked people. :P


>
> --
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>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Mordechai Behar]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Micha  wrote:

> On 05/02/2012 14:14, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to
> convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> >> student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook
> >> (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale
> >> for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license.
> >>
> >> Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a
> >> netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,
> >> there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places
> >> like Machsani Chasmal.
> >
> > I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office
> > cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I
> > quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this
> > actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels,
> > and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more
> > than one machine anyway).
> >
> > The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels.
> >
> > So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the
> cheapest
> > brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow.
> >
> > I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure
> > group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly)
> > discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children
> > themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense,
> > given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at
> > school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal.
> >
> >> No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a
> >> webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.
> >
> > And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they
> > spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and
> > connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever
> > they can.
> >
>
> I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but
> I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free
> license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax
> that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and
> tablets (android, ipad).
>
> Not sure if it's this link or something else:
> https://www.dreamspark.com/
> Although this seems to be just developer tools.
>
> Those are just developer tools, and even then, only a few institutions in
Israel are accepted as viable places of study that will allow a student to
download the software.
A better system is the MSDAA (Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance) which
allows a student who is registered for specific courses in specific
institutions to download and use nearly every Microsoft application,
including the actual operating system and office suite. However, to the
best of my knowledge this is only available to compsci and computer
engineering students at Hebrew University.
The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted
software, I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS. But when we bought
Windows 7 from them (for our home computer since my mother, a teacher,
needs to use a program that will only run on Windows in order to submit
grades) it came only as an upgrade, not a full license. That was also 100
NIS.
I think there are other organizations and institutions that provide such
large, or larger, discounts on MS software, but that just makes it worse
IMO. It sort of broadens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Although in this case it's those that have or have not kombinot.

I think that the length and speed of growth of this thread points to just
how frustrated we all are at the current situation. So why don't we change
it? We happen to have Hamakor, a registered nonprofit organization to
promote the use of free and open source software in Israel. So why not
start some kind of campaign? A public message? People are still riled up
about the social protests of the past summer, we could ride that wave.



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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 03:52:18PM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen  wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> >
> > > Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
> > > yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
> > > M$-Office substitute.
> >
> > In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google
> > Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not
> > have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact
> > with school.
> >
> > [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives
> > implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file,
> > which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea.
> 
> right, but don't forget that to in order to "read only"  a document, you
> don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link
> you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to
> take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its
> only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While
> using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to
> Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a
> NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier "marketing job" to do.

Are you interested in a read-only or  read-write format?

While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if
a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with
another.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's
tzaf...@cohens.org.il ||  best
tzaf...@debian.org|| friend

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 

HTML>

>
> I think that's not the best solution.
>

I agree. I use the opposite (HTML->doc) suggestion when i need to send
something to someone who absolutely must have a Word doc, that's why i
thought of it.

What I didn't realize when I typed my suggestion was that Word 2010 now has
"Save As PDF" built in. I don't think it was the case in the previous
versions - I remember IT people setting up a fake "PDF printer", etc.
Mordechai's post made me double-check... This is bound to be better than
Word->HTML.

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen  wrote:

>
> implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file,
> which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea.
>

I think okular handles it (RW) without a hitch. Unless you mean something
different from what I think you mean (I put my foot into my mounth more
than once in this thread already).  I just added a note in Adobe on Win7
and opened the doc in okular on linux.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

Even if true my point is different: my computer cannot be installed with
that claimed free software from MS. My laptop runs linux and that's not
somthing that is going to change, even if offered free windoze and office.

Sent from my mobile phone
>
> I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but
> I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free
> license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax
> that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and
> tablets (android, ipad).
>
> Not sure if it's this link or something else:
> https://www.dreamspark.com/
> Although this seems to be just developer tools.
>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Meir Michanie]

Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site
named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to
run windows in vmware,...
another site that kids have access for free if they login through ofek
is brainpop.
It's hard to explain to your kids to suffer their lack of access to
those site for a noble purpose of using OSS.


2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland :
> Hi all,
>
> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
> formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly
> schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it
> as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>
> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years
> most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in
> favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document
> formats.
>
> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Boaz.
>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 16:20, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> 
> On Feb 5, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Micha wrote:
>>
>> That is not so true any more with today's kids. I don't have a kid at
>> that age yet, but good friends of ours do and I think that about half
>> their class are using macs (and iPods and ipads). Their child actually
>> has to use the mother's computer half the time as the mac doesn't
>> support word in Hebrew or their homework system or the parents message
>> system (to let parents know of grades, tardiness etc.)
> 
> 
> Is that half of them have (a Mac OR an iOS device) or half of them have
> (a Mac AND and iOS device)?
> 
> Two very different things.
> 
> Just about everyone I know has some sort of iPod or iPad, but almost all
> of them have Windows computers.
> 
> Geoff.

About half have a mac laptop. Probably a lot more also have an iPhone
and/or ipad.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Micha wrote:


That is not so true any more with today's kids. I don't have a kid at
that age yet, but good friends of ours do and I think that about half
their class are using macs (and iPods and ipads). Their child actually
has to use the mother's computer half the time as the mac doesn't
support word in Hebrew or their homework system or the parents message
system (to let parents know of grades, tardiness etc.)



Is that half of them have (a Mac OR an iOS device) or half of them  
have (a Mac AND and iOS device)?


Two very different things.

Just about everyone I know has some sort of iPod or iPad, but almost  
all of them have Windows computers.


Geoff.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[sammy ominsky]

On 05/02/2012, at 03:40, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:

> Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How much
> does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)?

Microsoft publishes a full Office suite for Mac.  Unfortunately its Hebrew 
capability is literally unusable.

sambo
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 14:14, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to 
> convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
>> student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook
>> (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale
>> for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license.
>>
>> Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a
>> netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,
>> there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places
>> like Machsani Chasmal.
> 
> I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office 
> cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I
> quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this
> actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels,
> and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more
> than one machine anyway).
> 
> The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels.
> 
> So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the cheapest
> brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow.
> 
> I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure
> group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly)
> discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children
> themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense,
> given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at
> school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal.
> 
>> No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a
>> webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.
> 
> And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they
> spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and
> connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever
> they can.
> 

I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but
I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free
license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax
that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and
tablets (android, ipad).

Not sure if it's this link or something else:
https://www.dreamspark.com/
Although this seems to be just developer tools.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen  wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
>
> > Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
> > yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
> > M$-Office substitute.
>
> In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google
> Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not
> have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact
> with school.
>
> [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives
> implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file,
> which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea.
>
>

right, but don't forget that to in order to "read only"  a document, you
don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link
you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to
take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its
only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While
using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to
Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a
NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier "marketing job" to do.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 13:57, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to 
> convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
>> It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such
>> that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was
>> told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there
>> were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did
>> not provide for Hebrew.
> 
> I've been writing a lot in Hebrew in OpenOffice, and I can assure you,
> in my experience there's virtually *nothing* that OpenOffice is missing
> when it comes to Hebrew support. There are free Hebrew fonts (though you can
> also use the ones that come with Windows), free Hebrew spell-checker
> (of course ;-)), you can format everything properly right-to-left, and
> basically all the features, even the most obscure ones, work correctly
> in Hebrew: multi-column text, table of contents, index, niqqud, PDF
> export, etc.
> 

I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on
some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does
ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return).

Neither can do proper math if their life depended on it, or make it
cross platform (openoffice can't handle microsoft equations and vice versa).

Personally I use latex (mostly via lyx), but that is hardly for
everyone, or even most.

> Many of these features did, at one time in the past, in fact not work
> due to bugs, but all the important bugs have fixed, most of them years ago.
> 
> Is there anything specific to Hebrew that didn't work for him in
> OpenOffice?
> 
>> I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted
>> he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not
>> unique.
> 
> Again, I've been using almost any imaginable feature with OpenOffice's
> Writer in Hebrew, and everything seems to work, so I wonder what caused him
> trouble.
> 
> Note that I'm talking about the Writer and MS-Word here - not Impress
> and Powerpoint. I do know that people complain that Impress doesn't have
> as many feature as Powerpoint - but this is not Hebrew-specific (and not
> relevant to the word processor). As far as I'm concerned, all the
> features that Powerpoint has and OpenOffice Impress doesn't are
> superfluous anyway ;-)
> 
>> I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both
>> Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good
>> Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew
>> formatting. Mac users have to buy "niche" packages which do, but
>> they do not run on any other platform.
> 
> OpenOffice does an excellent job of Hebrew formatting, in my
> experience.
> 
> Perhaps you're thinking about not doing a good job of displaying
> Hebrew "doc" or "docx" files? I haven't seen this as a Hebrew-specific
> problem, but I have seen files which didn't look exactly like they
> were meant to. But almost always it didn't really matter.
> 
> 


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 12:45, Mordechai Behar wrote:
> I had a similar experience.
> I recently switched to a different college in a renewed attempt to gain
> my undergraduate in Compsci. Much to my chagrin I discovered that this
> college, which bills itself as being a technological college, is firmly
> entrenched in the Microsoft field. I tried talking to each and every
> professor and TA in turn, about why it is so difficult for them to click
> the Save As PDF button in MS Word so that people like me would be able
> to read the homework, not to mention the class material.
> And don't ask about the arguments I had about forcing people to use
> Visual Studio and the Microsoft compilers instead of the gcc.
> Much frustration.
> The thing is, they keep coming back to the same old "this is what
> everybody uses" argument. And when I point out that clearly this isn't
> so, since I don't use MS, apparently it is my own fault for being a
> non-conformist.
> And so, in order to be able to complete my courses I am forced to either
> shell out for proprietary software or come up with creative solutions.
> One such solution was to remotely connect to the college's servers and
> use the software available there on the Windows 2003 server. Which works
> best for converting documents to PDF, but not so good with programming.
> Apparently programs that compile in VS 2008 don't necessarily compile in
> VS 2010. Who'd have thought?
> 

2008 vs 2010 compatibility is even much worse than you think. By the
way, you can add gcc to the mix, although you can usually get away with
building your project with gcc and in the end wrapping it up with visual
for submission (unless you need windows interface).

> I don't want dissuade you you, and wish you the best of luck, but I
> wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. This harps back to a similar,
> recent thread about Israeli websites being designed for IE6, the people
> in charge are behind the times, and firmly convinced that the rest of us
> are at fault for it.

In Tel-Aviv university, at least the math department, things are better.
As a TA I refused microsoft documents from anyone, including official
university ones. It's not just due to me, but now almost everything
official is sent in PDF or PDF plus word.

Even my students had to find other ways to send information. I even
refused to upload exercises to the official virtual site until it
started supporting linux + firefox.

On the other hand, large parts of the faculty are either mac or linux so
it helps. The advantage with University is that most scientific journals
will only accept latex submission so it keeps the faculty more open to
alternative formats.

> 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland  >
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of
> the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like
> the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format
> and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my
> computer (which runs Ubuntu).
> 
> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over
> the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all
> the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable
> (e.g. PDF) document formats.
> 
> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Boaz.
> 
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> 
> 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt  wrote:

>
>
> 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 
>
>>
>> of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal
>> is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice
>> and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a
>> weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data
>> within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work
>> or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to
>> be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users.
>>
>
> How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which
> Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the
> creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of
> course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit...
>

I think that's not the best solution. I'd rather have the teacher spread
documents as either links to google docs documents, ODT documents, or PDF,
exported from those documents. I tend to think that the order described
above is the desired order of preference, at least to my taste and line of
thought. Google docs is the easiest and is portable anytime when google
will change something on their side. ODT is more cumbersome (requires
installation of OO on the systems used by the teachers) but is truly open
format, lasting solution. PDF is i think more comfortable to "transport"
than exported HTML.
I think that asking the staff to "export to html, check in your browser,
then possibly create a zip with the file + directory that contains the
images,etc" is too clumsy and will result in the initiative to drop dead
too soon.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

I fully agree. Having *whatever* percentage of distributed material
requiring *whatever* percentage of students to spend hundreds (or even
tens) of NIS on HW/SW in order to cooperate is *totally
unacceptable*especially in light of no-cost alternatives (SW only of
course. HW will
still be needed).

2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt 

>
>
> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
>
>>
>>  I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to "your
>> homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual"? Or "write down
>> your homework" at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is
>> necessary?
>>
>
> Eh, reading comprehension failure on my part again: the OP's problem is
> not with home assignments but with school-wide distribution such as weekly
> schedule. This renders the Word requirement - or even a computer
> requirement - even less reasonable, IMHO. Making 5% - or 1% - of families
> to buy a computer and/or specialized SW just to view a schedule is totally
> unacceptable on financial grounds only.
>
> --
> Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org 
>
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>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 12:14, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> 
> On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:40 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
>>
>> Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How
>> much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)?
>>
> 
> It's almost irrelevant. Most Macs come with an Apple Office suite
> (Pages, etc) which has little to no Hebrew support. MS/Office for the
> Mac supports Hebrew at a very basic level but it is expensive.  However,
> there are so few Macs around that no one really cares about what they
> support.
> 

That is not so true any more with today's kids. I don't have a kid at
that age yet, but good friends of ours do and I think that about half
their class are using macs (and iPods and ipads). Their child actually
has to use the mother's computer half the time as the mac doesn't
support word in Hebrew or their homework system or the parents message
system (to let parents know of grades, tardiness etc.)

> In the world, the majority of UNIX systems are Macs. In the US around
> 12% of the computers on desktops are Macs, and in Israel a few percent
> of them are Macs. With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy
> cheap PC's with Windows bundled and get the student/home version of
> office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access
> (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three
> computer license.
> 
> Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a
> netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,
> there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like
> Machsani Chasmal.
> 
> 
> 
>> Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments on
>> the web? Should be much easier than to email them?
> 
> 
> No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster
> to post them and coordinate the postings.
> 
> Geoff.


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 

>
> of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal
> is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice
> and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a
> weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data
> within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work
> or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to
> be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users.
>

How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which
Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the
creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of
course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit...


> I do think that there's a valid point here nevertheless - saving ink on
> rather useless images, even if sometimes appropriate, is a good practice.
> Kids should be taught the same as well.
>

A war story: some years ago I was teaching at Haifa U, and before each
lecture I would post the slides on a website. After a couple of lectures
some students approached me and asked to remove the university logo from
the slides - it turned out that it was heavy and slow to print even in
black and white, on a university (let alone home) printer. I complied, of
course, and my slides remained logoless for years.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince 
to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook
> (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale
> for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license.
> 
> Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a
> netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,
> there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places
> like Machsani Chasmal.

I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office 
cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I
quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this
actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels,
and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more
than one machine anyway).

The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels.

So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the cheapest
brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow.

I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure
group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly)
discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children
themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense,
given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at
school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal.

> No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a
> webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.

And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they
spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and
connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever
they can.

-- 
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I want to be a human being, not a human
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |doing -- Scatman John

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

Hi,

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince 
to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such
> that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was
> told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there
> were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did
> not provide for Hebrew.

I've been writing a lot in Hebrew in OpenOffice, and I can assure you,
in my experience there's virtually *nothing* that OpenOffice is missing
when it comes to Hebrew support. There are free Hebrew fonts (though you can
also use the ones that come with Windows), free Hebrew spell-checker
(of course ;-)), you can format everything properly right-to-left, and
basically all the features, even the most obscure ones, work correctly
in Hebrew: multi-column text, table of contents, index, niqqud, PDF
export, etc.

Many of these features did, at one time in the past, in fact not work
due to bugs, but all the important bugs have fixed, most of them years ago.

Is there anything specific to Hebrew that didn't work for him in
OpenOffice?

> I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted
> he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not
> unique.

Again, I've been using almost any imaginable feature with OpenOffice's
Writer in Hebrew, and everything seems to work, so I wonder what caused him
trouble.

Note that I'm talking about the Writer and MS-Word here - not Impress
and Powerpoint. I do know that people complain that Impress doesn't have
as many feature as Powerpoint - but this is not Hebrew-specific (and not
relevant to the word processor). As far as I'm concerned, all the
features that Powerpoint has and OpenOffice Impress doesn't are
superfluous anyway ;-)

> I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both
> Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good
> Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew
> formatting. Mac users have to buy "niche" packages which do, but
> they do not run on any other platform.

OpenOffice does an excellent job of Hebrew formatting, in my
experience.

Perhaps you're thinking about not doing a good job of displaying
Hebrew "doc" or "docx" files? I haven't seen this as a Hebrew-specific
problem, but I have seen files which didn't look exactly like they
were meant to. But almost always it didn't really matter.


-- 
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I saw a book titled "Die Microsoft
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |Windows". Turns out it was in German...

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 1:22 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:



Eh, reading comprehension failure on my part again: the OP's problem  
is not with home assignments but with school-wide distribution such  
as weekly schedule. This renders the Word requirement - or even a  
computer requirement - even less reasonable, IMHO. Making 5% - or 1%  
- of families to buy a computer and/or specialized SW just to view a  
schedule is totally unacceptable on financial grounds only.



In our case, the schools provide printed versions of the schedule.  
They also email it to make sure the parents get it, instead of it  
sitting forever in the student's book bag and then thrown on.


My wife uses Outlook (the commercial version, not the bundled email  
program) for scheduling and she can highlight and click items to put  
them into her schedule.


It's really a courtesy for the parents, not a requirement.

I do a lot of email back and forth with my youngest son's teacher  
because she uses terms like "next week", or "soon", etc, and I want  
exact dates.


Geoff.

--
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My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(














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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:

> Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
> yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
> M$-Office substitute.

In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google
Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not
have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact
with school.

[1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives
implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file,
which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's
tzaf...@cohens.org.il ||  best
tzaf...@debian.org|| friend

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 1:00 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:

Now, I would assume that most on the parents in this discussion are  
qualified professionals with reasonably well paying jobs, and I  
would not be surprised if most had multiple computers at home, etc.  
Let's face it, it's not a representative sample of the general  
population. IMHO, "it's not that expensive" just doesn't cut it.



It's not necessary to own a computer. Almost every school in the  
country has computers in the classroom and a computer room for the  
overflow. Student's are given "study periods" to do their homework.


There are also plenty of programs out there to provide new and used  
computers to poor people. I constantly see adds for people selling  
used computers and people asking for gifts/donations of them. I even  
see adds on the English language lists for people looking for the  
latest laptops free, or even a "basic" laptop which to them includes  
Windows and Word and Wifi.


I don't know if they get them or not, my requests for something older,  
e.g. a 386/486/Pentium(I) have gone unanswered.


When my youngest son was 4 (he's 13 now) I bought him a microsoft  
trackball (the one the size of a grapefruit) to try to get him to use  
a computer. He was at the time in a school specializing in educating  
students with physical limitations. It was a waste of money because he  
had been given lessons on using a regular mouse as part of his regular  
instruction.


As for emailed homework, Oleg, when you were in school, part of the  
instruction was to be able to pay attention in class, and write down  
your homework assignments so that you could do them at home.


These days part of the classwork is to be able to get an email with  
instructions and follow them.
It also saves duplicating costs, and you can't say that you left your  
book at school or you were out sick that day.


Geoff.

--
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My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(














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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt  wrote:

>
>  I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to "your
> homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual"? Or "write down
> your homework" at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is
> necessary?
>

Eh, reading comprehension failure on my part again: the OP's problem is not
with home assignments but with school-wide distribution such as weekly
schedule. This renders the Word requirement - or even a computer
requirement - even less reasonable, IMHO. Making 5% - or 1% - of families
to buy a computer and/or specialized SW just to view a schedule is totally
unacceptable on financial grounds only.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

I wouldn't say Linux as it confused people (worked in university, don't think 
that it would work at school). But you can to with tablet (iPad/android). Those 
cost money to open word and still have a lot of issues if they do. PDF works 
but is not editable. Not sure if there is an editable solution though that is 
portable enough. Maybe Google docs, of it's not too geeky.

Boaz Rymland  wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
>formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the
>weekly
>schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't
>like it
>as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs
>Ubuntu).
>
>Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
>years
>most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments
>in
>favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document
>formats.
>
>Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>
>Thanks,
>Boaz.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:14 PM, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy cheap PC's with
> Windows bundled


Well, whatever the bar chart of different HW/OS sightings may be in Israel,
this IMHO utterly fails as an argument that a particular family *must* buy
an Windows computer - inexpensive as it may be - if it does not have one,
just to be able to view/print school assignments. I wonder if it is even
legal on the part of a school to demand this.

and get the student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook
> (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as
> low as 300 NIS for a three computer license.
>

Again, I may be naive but it seems to me that there is something basically
wrong with the idea that public school education should depend on the
parents' ability to "find" second-hand SW of uncertain provenance on a
garage sale or wherever.


> Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook
> with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were
> still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani
> Chasmal.


This is a lot of money, and again, from the sound of it this is not what is
normally called "generally available".

Now, I would assume that most on the parents in this discussion are
qualified professionals with reasonably well paying jobs, and I would not
be surprised if most had multiple computers at home, etc. Let's face it,
it's not a representative sample of the general population. IMHO, "it's not
that expensive" just doesn't cut it.

No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to
> post them and coordinate the postings.
>

Good point. I assumed a school that requires pupils to have computers would
have IT staff and a website. It ain't necessarily so (to quote the
Gershwins).

 I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to "your
homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual"? Or "write down
your homework" at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is
necessary?

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Mordechai Behar]

I had a similar experience.
I recently switched to a different college in a renewed attempt to gain my
undergraduate in Compsci. Much to my chagrin I discovered that this
college, which bills itself as being a technological college, is firmly
entrenched in the Microsoft field. I tried talking to each and every
professor and TA in turn, about why it is so difficult for them to click
the Save As PDF button in MS Word so that people like me would be able to
read the homework, not to mention the class material.
And don't ask about the arguments I had about forcing people to use Visual
Studio and the Microsoft compilers instead of the gcc.
Much frustration.
The thing is, they keep coming back to the same old "this is what everybody
uses" argument. And when I point out that clearly this isn't so, since I
don't use MS, apparently it is my own fault for being a non-conformist.
And so, in order to be able to complete my courses I am forced to either
shell out for proprietary software or come up with creative solutions. One
such solution was to remotely connect to the college's servers and use the
software available there on the Windows 2003 server. Which works best for
converting documents to PDF, but not so good with programming. Apparently
programs that compile in VS 2008 don't necessarily compile in VS 2010.
Who'd have thought?

I don't want dissuade you you, and wish you the best of luck, but I
wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. This harps back to a similar,
recent thread about Israeli websites being designed for IE6, the people in
charge are behind the times, and firmly convinced that the rest of us are
at fault for it.
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 

> Hi all,
>
> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
> formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly
> schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it
> as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>
> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
> years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the
> arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF)
> document formats.
>
> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Boaz.
>
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>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince
> to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > I bet it cannot read my teacher's  document!
>
> Before you go and complain about some supposed facts, I think you should
> verify that they are really correct facts. Is OpenOffice *really* unable
> to read these files (usually it can)? Is Android really not able to read
> it? If you import this document into Google Docs (or equivalently, get it
> by mail to gmail), can't you preview it?
>

of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal
is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice
and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a
weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data
within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work
or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to
be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users.


> > a table full of oversized
> > text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images
> that
> > never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather
> appear
> > somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as
> > well!
>
> People doing ugly formatting and wasting ink isn't specific to Microsoft
> Word :( Even if you get them to send you ODF or PDF, they can still send
> you these ugly pieces of crap :(
>

Right :-)
I do think that there's a valid point here nevertheless - saving ink on
rather useless images, even if sometimes appropriate, is a good practice.
Kids should be taught the same as well.

Boaz.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:40 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:


Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How  
much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)?




It's almost irrelevant. Most Macs come with an Apple Office suite  
(Pages, etc) which has little to no Hebrew support. MS/Office for the  
Mac supports Hebrew at a very basic level but it is expensive.   
However, there are so few Macs around that no one really cares about  
what they support.


In the world, the majority of UNIX systems are Macs. In the US around  
12% of the computers on desktops are Macs, and in Israel a few percent  
of them are Macs. With the high price of Macs here many parents just  
buy cheap PC's with Windows bundled and get the student/home version  
of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and  
Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS  
for a three computer license.


Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a  
netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,  
there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places  
like Machsani Chasmal.




Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments  
on the web? Should be much easier than to email them?



No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a  
webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.


Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(














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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> I bet it cannot read my teacher's  document!

Before you go and complain about some supposed facts, I think you should
verify that they are really correct facts. Is OpenOffice *really* unable
to read these files (usually it can)? Is Android really not able to read
it? If you import this document into Google Docs (or equivalently, get it
by mail to gmail), can't you preview it?

> a table full of oversized
> text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that
> never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear
> somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as
> well!

People doing ugly formatting and wasting ink isn't specific to Microsoft
Word :( Even if you get them to send you ODF or PDF, they can still send
you these ugly pieces of crap :(

My wife recently got a paper, in PDF format. It turns out it wasn't a normal
PDF as you might expect - someone scanned a photocopied printou,
and sent that as a PDF. The scan was up-side-down (!), and the photocopy
process turned out a large black ink-sucking margin around the page.
But hey, at least it was an open format :-)


-- 
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Boat: A hole in the water surrounded by
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |wood into which one pours money.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Etzion Bar-Noy wrote:


Because most households in israel do not buy their office...

It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school  
headmaster does not assume that either. He/she knows most people  
just "have" their office installed, and they care nothing about it.




It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that  
a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by  
the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were  
capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not  
provide for Hebrew.


I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he  
is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not  
unique.


I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both  
Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good  
Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew  
formatting. Mac users have to buy "niche" packages which do, but they  
do not run on any other platform.


On the other hand, my youngest son who is a different student in a  
different school, who does much less sophisticated writing, has been  
using OpenOffice since elementary school, and almost, if not all,  
public schools in Jerusalem have been using it for at least 5 years.


Geoff.


--
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

> It is not reasonable to ask everyone to install Acroread, or anything else
> that is not available by default when you buy a computer from Office Depot.
> You would have to send out an instruction sheet and call a parents meeting
> to explain why this is necessary. You think that they will do this just for
> you?


Well, I think I misread the OP. I thought the issue was submitting
homework. In that case the only one who needs a PDF reader is the
teacher... I returned to the original post now - my mistake.

I have had very little problem *reading* not terribly complicated Word docs
in OOO in the last ten years or so. The formatting may be screwed up a
little, but you generally don't miss stuff. As the latest example I had to
go over a legal contract in the last few days, and LibreOffice did it
wonderfully, tracking changes and all.  Are home assignments much more
complicated than that?

I am sure you know infinitely more about OOO than I do, so I'll defer. ;-)

No. The principal correctly assumes that most parents have a computer with
> MS Office. This is a reasonable assumption.


Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How much
does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)?

Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments on the
web? Should be much easier than to email them?

-- 
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:


Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 10:04:07 +0200
From: Oleg Goldshmidt 
To: Nadav Har'El 
Cc: linux-il , Jonathan Ben Avraham 
Subject: Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats


What are the school's arguments for not accepting a PDF? The unsurmountable 
difficulty of installing acroread on the
teachers' computers? Or is acroread so hopelessly behind the times that it does 
not allow marking and annotating? If the
latter, then OOO...


It is not reasonable to ask everyone to install Acroread, or anything else 
that is not available by default when you buy a computer from Office 
Depot. You would have to send out an instruction sheet and call a parents 
meeting to explain why this is necessary. You think that they will do this 
just for you?



I think the principal should agree that requiring the parents to buy a computer 
with Office just for homework is quite
unreasonable. I'd try thos argument before anything else, and maybe instead of 
everything else.


No. The principal correctly assumes that most parents have a computer with 
MS Office. This is a reasonable assumption. There is absolutely no 
requirement to buy something that everyone already has, because you 
already have it anyway an no one buys it so it doesn't cost anything in 
any event.


 - yba



--
Oleg GoldshmidtOn Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: 
Preparing to convince to shift to
non-propriety documents formats":
> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
> will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
> hopeless geek.

I am not sure about the time not being ripe.

In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
Windows+OpenOffice).

They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
perfect.

And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
for the legal Microsoft Windows).

> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
> longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
> you need either PDF or Google docs.

I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
coming to an end.


--
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n...@math.technion.ac.il             |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |it I would have no luck at all!

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Etzion Bar-Noy wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to 
shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Because most households in israel do not buy their office...

I was hoping that even if this is true, and everybody knows this is
true, no school principal would dare raise this in his argument...
I am hoping that no principal could condone such illegal activity.

And as a matter of fact, unskilled people who go to a legitimate computer
store to buy their computer (e.g., Ivory where I bought the computers which
I mentioned), do *not* get offered a free, pirated, copy of MS-Office.

If they do ask for MS-Windows and MS-Office, nobody will volunteer to
help them break the law; Rather they will get their price quote jacked
by almost 1,000 shekels - the combined price of both Microsoft products.
To be fair, the total price of a computer and a screen and these two
Microsoft products is now around 2,500 shekels, which might not seem a
lot to most Israelis (who pay more than that on a new phone...), but
if a poor person could actually save 1,000 on that total, or just 500
(with Windows but not Office), it's an outrage not to encourage him to.

Yes, it's posssible that most people are savvy enough to know that if
they need Microsoft office, they shouldn't buy it at the store, and
rather ask their kid (or the neighbor's kid) to install it for them for
free. But knowing this does take some information, which poor people
might not have. And we can end up with the lousy (but unfortunately)
common situation where poor people pay more than rich people for the
same service.

-- 
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n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |My greatest fear is that no-one will
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |remember me after I'm dead - some dead guy

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

What are the school's arguments for not accepting a PDF? The unsurmountable
difficulty of installing acroread on the teachers' computers? Or is
acroread so hopelessly behind the times that it does not allow marking and
annotating? If the latter, then OOO...

I think the principal should agree that requiring the parents to buy a
computer with Office just for homework is quite unreasonable. I'd try thos
argument before anything else, and maybe instead of everything else.

-- 
Oleg GoldshmidtOn Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re:
Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
> will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
> hopeless geek.

I am not sure about the time not being ripe.

In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
Windows+OpenOffice).

They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
perfect.

And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
for the legal Microsoft Windows).

> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
> longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
> you need either PDF or Google docs.

I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
coming to an end.


--
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5
2012,
n...@math.technion.ac.il
|-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck -
without
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |it I would have no luck at all!

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Nadav Har'El wrote:

>
> I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
> box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
> Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
> coming to an end.
>

I bet it cannot read my teacher's  document!: a table full of oversized
text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that
never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear
somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as
well!

:-)

oh boy. I had to release some steam!... :-)


>
> --
> Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5
> 2012,
> n...@math.technion.ac.il
> |-
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck -
> without
> http://nadav.harel.org.il   |it I would have no luck at all!
>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Etzion Bar-Noy]

Because most households in israel do not buy their office...

It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school headmaster does
not assume that either. He/she knows most people just "have" their office
installed, and they care nothing about it.

Ez
On Feb 5, 2012 9:12 AM, "Nadav Har'El"  wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Preparing to
> convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> > Hi Boaz,
> > The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
> > will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
> > hopeless geek.
>
> I am not sure about the time not being ripe.
>
> In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
> copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
> Windows+OpenOffice).
>
> They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
> documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
> convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
> times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
> perfect.
>
> And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
> I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
> protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
> these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
> of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
> for the legal Microsoft Windows).
>
> > A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
> > longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
> > you need either PDF or Google docs.
>
> I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
> box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
> Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
> coming to an end.
>
>
> --
> Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5
> 2012,
> n...@math.technion.ac.il
> |-
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck -
> without
> http://nadav.harel.org.il   |it I would have no luck at all!
>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

Ori,
While technically you might be correct - I'll take your word for it - this
argument is hardly a relevant or helping to convince her. If I say that to
her, in the best case she'll reply "what the hell are you talking about
Boaz? The system currently works, everyone are getting their weekly
schedule and nobody is complaining but you".
In the worst case, she'll think the same but wont say it. At that time, I'm
more or less done with her as far as she is concerned and it will be much
harder to further talk to her about such issues.

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Ori Idan  wrote:

> Another point to notice is that there is no such format as MS word format.
> Each version has a different format and sometimes one can not open the
> documents that was sent to him in this format.
> I have seen many cases where OpenOffice opened files that people who had a
> version of MS-word could not open.
>
> --
> Ori Idan
>
>
> 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 
>
>>  Hi all,
>>
>> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
>> formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly
>> schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it
>> as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>>
>> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
>> years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the
>> arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF)
>> document formats.
>>
>> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Boaz.
>>
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>>
>>
>
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

Hi,

thanks for the answer (and allow me to thank following commenters to whom I
reply soon as well).
Please see some comment below.

2012/2/5 Jonathan Ben Avraham 

> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will
> not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek.
>

I disagree. *Its always the time*.
I'm not talking about converting her to FOSS and make her think about
capitalism pigs all day long and suggesting Linus Torvalds as a Nobel price
candidate.
As always, I'm going to do it* step by step*, with careful planning and
little hopes. I only want to be able to read (and print) my daughter's
weekly schedule on my computer. No more. I'm going to prepare small, easy
to digest and short statements about this to my principal. I'm not hoping
that she'll accept them at the meeting's time. I might need to check on
that later. Its a relationship and someone else already said that
"everything is personal". In this case, personal matters matter a lot for
adoption or willingness to try it.


> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer
> using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need
> either PDF or Google docs.
>


Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
M$-Office substitute.
I lean toward talking to her about Google Docs and ODT (parse-able either
by OpenOffice or Google Docs as well). I already prepared a template weekly
schedule in google docs. Nothing is more presuasive than giving the person
a half made solution: "here, just fill in here and email! Hey! you can very
easily also "download as pdf" and email that!".


> I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the
> American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and
> give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head
> switch about three years ago when the younger students who were the early
> technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the principal, and not
> from the parents either, both groups being generally clueless.
>

I agree with your comment about adopters or better technology. Not
surprising :-)

Boaz.



>  - yba
>
>
> On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:
>
>  Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
>> From: Boaz Rymland 
>> To: linux-il 
>> Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
>> formats of documents the school spreads around
>> routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS
>> Word format and I don't like it as I cannot
>> cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>>
>> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
>> years most of them - still I prefer having a
>> refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at
>> least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.
>>
>> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Boaz.
>>
>>
>>
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> Systems
> =}**ooO--U--**
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Preparing to 
convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
> will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
> hopeless geek.

I am not sure about the time not being ripe.

In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
Windows+OpenOffice).

They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
perfect.

And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
for the legal Microsoft Windows).

> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
> longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
> you need either PDF or Google docs.

I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
coming to an end.


-- 
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |it I would have no luck at all!

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Etzion Bar-Noy]

I agree with the notion. At best - the school headmaster will ask you what
to open it with, and how would the students with ms office would handle it.
This is hopeless, unfortunately.

Ez
On Feb 5, 2012 8:48 AM, "Jonathan Ben Avraham"  wrote:

> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will
> not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek.
>
> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer
> using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need
> either PDF or Google docs.
>
> I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the
> American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and
> give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head
> switch about three years ago when the younger students who were the early
> technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the principal, and not
> from the parents either, both groups being generally clueless.
>
>  - yba
>
>
> On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:
>
>  Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
>> From: Boaz Rymland 
>> To: linux-il 
>> Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
>>
>> Hi all,
>> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
>> formats of documents the school spreads around
>> routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS
>> Word format and I don't like it as I cannot
>> cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>>
>> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
>> years most of them - still I prefer having a
>> refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at
>> least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.
>>
>> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Boaz.
>>
>>
>>
> --
>  EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5  83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA~. .~   Tk Open
> Systems
> =}**ooO--U--**
> Ooo{=
> - y...@tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
> ___
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Ori Idan wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift 
to non-propriety documents formats":
> Another point to notice is that there is no such format as MS word format.
> Each version has a different format and sometimes one can not open the
> documents that was sent to him in this format.
> I have seen many cases where OpenOffice opened files that people who had a
> version of MS-word could not open.

Be careful not to rely on arguments that can easily be refuted...

I saw someone with an old version of MS-Word receive a newer ("docx")
document. His Word popped up a message saying something like "This document
comes from a newer version of Word, you need to download a converter for
this format". He clicked "OK", and in a couple of minutes he was able to
read this document, and see it just like Microsoft intended.

I tried to read the same document on my OpenOffice, and it was kind of
visible, I guess, but it was quite far from what the document was
intended to look like :(

-- 
Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Politics, n: from Greek, "poly"=many,
http://nadav.harel.org.il   |"ticks"=blood sucking parasites.

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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 07:20:39AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
> formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly
> schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it
> as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
> 
> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years
> most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in
> favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document
> formats.
> 
> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.

Searching for stuff like 'do not email me doc files' will find you plenty
of such lists.

In addition to "classic" points you can find, you might suggest that in
this age of always-online connectivity, it's probably better to publish
stuff on the net and not send files. Potential examples: some Wiki (e.g.
wikia.com, there are others), google docs and its competitors, etc.
-- 
Didi


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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

Hi Boaz,
The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will 
not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless 
geek.


A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer 
using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need 
either PDF or Google docs.


I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the 
American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and 
give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head 
switch about three years ago when the younger students who were 
the early technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the 
principal, and not from the parents either, both groups being generally 
clueless.


 - yba


On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:


Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
From: Boaz Rymland 
To: linux-il 
Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

Hi all,
I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats 
of documents the school spreads around
routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word 
format and I don't like it as I cannot
cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).

Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years 
most of them - still I prefer having a
refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least 
affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.

Any pointers/text will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Boaz.




--
 EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5  83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA~. .~   Tk Open Systems
=}ooO--U--Ooo{=
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Ori Idan]

Another point to notice is that there is no such format as MS word format.
Each version has a different format and sometimes one can not open the
documents that was sent to him in this format.
I have seen many cases where OpenOffice opened files that people who had a
version of MS-word could not open.

-- 
Ori Idan


2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland 

> Hi all,
>
> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
> formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly
> schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it
> as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>
> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
> years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the
> arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF)
> document formats.
>
> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Boaz.
>
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>
>
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