AZgl1800 wrote: ⤴Thu Dec 14, 2023 7:48 am
Lady Fitzgerald wrote: ⤴Thu Dec 14, 2023 4:40 am
I'm not a technophobe but i also keep little Tutorials on how to do things in Libre Office Writer docs and PDFs (in case LO becomes unavailable someday).
get in the habit of saving all write docs as *.docx
and all Excel spreadsheets as *.xls
that way, you can import to any thing on this planet.
I developed that strategy years ago, when forced to co-mingle with the blue screen folks
One reason I use PDFs is they are compatible with all platforms, are stable (unlike LibreOffice docs that don't always translate well to Microsoft docs) and it's highly unlikely that PDF readers for every platform will ever disappear or otherwise become unsupported, like Open Office did (granted, LibreOffice replaced Open Office and maintained compatibility but it also could become unsupported some day).
When I said that I keep copies of my little tutorials in LibreOffice docs and PDFs, I should have said that I create the tutorials in LibreOffice and export them as PDFs for readability across platforms and stability (they are highly unlikely to "accidentally" be changed by me or anyone else) and embed the original LibreOffice doc inside the PDF when exporting. That way, I can easily edit the PDF if I ever need to by opening it in the program that created it, edit it, then export back to PDF. Usually, I don't export a document to a PDF until it reaches what I hope is its final stage.
I first started using PDFs a couple of decades or so when I was writing Chapbooks for a Renaissance Festival Guild that has a bookstore at a Ren Fest in CA using MS Word. The Word docs I first made were in what was then the latest version of Word at the time to be used as masters when printed at a copy/printing company, such as Office Max. Unfortunately, the head of the Guild and the copy/print shops were unable to use the files I created because the version I used had a feature that the earlier versions didn't, making them unusable. The guild had to keep master copies of each chapbook I wrote and run them off on copy machines which cost more than printing directly from a file.
That's when I discovered PDFs. They just were readable on anyone's computer. That became handy for all my own documents when I later switched from Win 7 to Linux and left MS only programs in my dust. Since all my documents were in PDF form, I was still able to read them without MS Office. I keep all my important documents—financial, legal, etc.—in PDF so I don't have to worry about compatibility in the future and so the executor of my "estate" will be able to read and print them as needed using whatever "final" version of Microsoft OS is current once I'm dust.
While way overkill for most people, I use a professional PDF creation/editing program (Qoppa PDF Studio Pro, not Adobe Acrobat; I gave Adobe the bird a couple of years or so before I gave MS the bird) for much of my PDF work, such as some creation and editing that would be more difficult in LibreOffice, especially for graphics heavy documents, and as my default PDF reader. Fortunately, I don't need for anyone who will need any of my PDFs to be able to edit them.
Like I always say sometimes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I was just pointing out some of the misconceptions of PDFs and why I use PDFs. I'm not demanding they should always be used.
). It's basically the same way I learned Windows back in the 90s.
