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Re: Reference Manual updates

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thu Dec 2 18:46:23 1999 )

Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 15:32:26 -0800 (PST)
From: Jeff Kesselman <Jeffrey.Kesselman@eng.sun.com>
To: coldstuff@cold.org
Reply-To: coldstuff@cold.org

First off,  I agree with you, just to view the documents there are better 
solutions then Word or a word-alike.  PDF really IS modified postscript, made a 
bit more sueful for on-lien viewing and with soem interractive features.  
(Remember both PDF and post-script were invented by Adobe.)

Still its easy enough to generate both PDF and Postscript from a Word document. 
id be happy to do both.

Just viewing though there are plenty of solutions (PDF has native readers for 
most common environments and a Java reader for all others  that support Java.) I 
assumed that Brandon's cocnern was mroe that he didnt want it in a form that
was 'read only" to him. StarOfficve potentially  provides a simple solution to 
that.

The discussion really has to center around "where do we go FROM word" as that is 
the author's preferred tool and trying to talk any volunteer into learning and 
using a different tool will generally at best do nothign and at worst alinate 
them and stop the work from progressign at all.

This is alot like the golden rule-- "He who has the gold makes the rules." In 
volunteer projects, volunteer effort is the gold.  Unless someoene else is 
steppign up and offering to do the same work in a different tool, word IS our 
starting point.

JK