[Haifux] The "Higher Education" Need Education on Linux?

[Dotan Cohen]

> And from the people higher then me on the food chain (probably everybody
> here) what is the situation in the Technion/Haifa U? Are many people in the
> know? Are many people completely against?

As I have stated in other threads, the main problem facing Linux
adoption in the Technion globally (not specific to any faculty) is the
use of Word documents where PDF would be better. Lots of papers for
homework, labs, study augmentation, formulas pages, and notices are
sent in Word. These are documents that are not intended to be edited,
only read.

The Technion should install PDF printers in all the little secratary's
and mtarglim's computers and demand that they send PDF. The advantages
to PDF are:

1) Portability: they look the same on all platforms, software
versions, screen resolutions, screen DPI, fonts installed, mathtype or
not installed, printer drivers or not installed (yes, word looks
different according to all these things)

2) Easier to read: Word is an _editor_ and the user must play around
with a cursor as opposed to a PDF reader which is a document _viewer_.
The difference is like browsing in Caret mode (try pressing F7) or
regular mode in a web browser.

3) No way for the student to 'accidentally' modify the file before he
prints it, and has the wrong info. Yes, I have seen this happen to a
lab partner!

4) There is another advantage which I cannot remember at the moment.
But it is important!

There are quality FOSS PDF print drivers available for Windows. Here
is one that I am familiar with:
http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=pdfcreator&filename=PDFCreator-0_9_5_setup.exe

And here is Microsoft's "Save As PDF" plugin for MS Office:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F1FC413C-6D89-4F15-991B-63B07BA5F2E5

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il

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