PDF Revisited or Egg on my Face

[Benjamin Sher]

Dear friends:

There is good news and bad news:

First, the bad news:

Well, I've got to 'fess up: the Acrobat PDF Writer printer
driver was way off. The one at Acrobat's web site is, as was
pointed out to me again by a list member, an old printer
driver from 1996 that worked with Acrobat Reader 2.1 or so,
really ancient software by now.

As it turns out, I do happen to have a current
AcrobatPDFWriter printer driver installed on my computer.
What I didn't know, and what the gentleman from the list
was kind enough to enlighten me on, was that this driver
came with my Adobe Photo Deluxe 4.0 software, which you
get with the Microteck ScanMaker scanner. It was installed
automatically, unbeknownst to me, when installing the
scanner software and is available as a PDF printer driver for
any Windows application (and perhaps only for any Mac
application -- those of you who have Adobe Photo Deluxe
4.0 for the Mac might wish to check on this). That's why I
got so confused. Glad to know the true state of affairs.

Now, the really good news:

The same gentleman brought to my attention a free office
suite for Windows (free for non-commercial use) called
EasyOffice (about 42 MEG compressed download file). Not
only does this include a word processor but also a
spreadsheet and presentation program. And, lo and behold,
it also includes a PDF printer driver just like Adobe's and
PDF995. You might wish to try it. The URL is:

EasyOffice
http://www.e-press.com/

So, for PDF you now have four free options: (the
AcrobatPDFWriter printer driver IF and only IF it was
installed on your computer by one of Adobe's other
products), the PDF995 printer driver, the postscript GSView
PDF printer driver and the EasyOffice printer driver.

You will find the last three free versions mentioned on my
Index.

While I am on the subject of office suites, you may already
know that StarOffice (currently at version 6) is no longer
free. It now costs $75. However, you can get an equally
good free version of StarOffice 6 called OpenOffice.org,
which serves as the foundation for StarOffice. The URL is:

http://www.openoffice.org/

This is a FULL-FEATURED office suite, completely free and
available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and now even for the
Mac (the first beta version was just issued a few weeks
ago). OpenOffice is just as rich as StarOffice, has full file
format compatiblity and with Microsoft Office, including the
latest Office XP. That is, it will convert most Microsoft Word,
Excel and Presentation documents to its own OpenOffice
format very well and will convert its own OpenOffice file
formats equally well back to Microsoft Office file formats.
The one thing it cannot convert is Microsoft macros. The
only substantial thing it lacks is a database program (which
will be added later). For that, if you know how to run a
database program (I assuredly do not), you can get the very
popular and very highly thought MySQL database program
(used everywhere by web hosts on the Net), also
completely free and available for every conceivable
platform, including Windows, Mac and Linux. The URL is:

http://www.mysql.com/

(MySQL is usually coupled with the PHP or Perl script
programs, also available for free and for all platforms from
the Web).

That's it.

Benjamin

Sher's Russian Web
http://www.websher.net
Benjamin and Anna Sher
sher07 at mindspring.com

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