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Written by William Davies
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Tuesday, 03 October 2006 |
Use PDFCreator to generate PDF documents directly from any Windows program. PDF (Portable Document Format) files are the de facto standard in electronic publishing, because the author can be sure that the document will look as intended on all platforms, regardless of local fonts or lack thereof. PDFs can also be generated with commercial packages, but PDFCreator is by far the easiest and cheapest option (free). Once installed, simply select 'Print' from the File menu of your word processor or drawing program, and select 'PDFCreator Printer' from the list of printers. Click 'Save' and enter a name for your PDF output file. That's it!
Optionally, you may also enter information to identify the document, such as Title, Creation Date and Author. The Options dialogue lets you control the process in more detail. You can set the resolution and compression levels for the various file types, and control how fonts are included. Use the security feature to protect your document with a password. JPEG, PNG, Postscript (PS) and Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) output formats are also supported. |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 04 January 2007 )
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Are We Educating Or Training? |
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Written by William Davies
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Monday, 28 August 2006 |
Are we educating or training?
It is appropriate for a business to standardize on a hardware or software platform, but multi-platform computing is ideal in an educational environment. If we want children to learn concepts and not products, we should teach them using diverse platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and diverse software (MS Office, Open Office, Abiword, Apple Works(?)). Teaching concepts is education; teaching products is training.
What's current is passé.
We need to look beyond the currently dominant business practices to determine which products we should have and teach in our schools, and we need to educate our children instead of training them. The very first version of MS Office was released in 1989, and now millions of professionals -- who were already out of school then -- use it every day. There is no reason not to teach using up-and-coming technologies such as Open Office, which may well dominate the professional world of the future. (The state government of Massachusetts, for example, is committed to migrating by January, 2007 to the document format used by Open Office.) Such a shift in focus from MS Office to Open Office, which is free, can save the district thousands of dollars which can then be put toward obtaining more computers and equipment or personnel. Even if the district doesn't want to incorporate Open Office in the curriculum at this point, at least computers without MS Office should be supplied with Open Office (fast computers) or the Abi office tools (Abiword and others) to increase access to productivity applications. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 06 September 2006 )
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Scribus - Open Source Desktop Publishing |
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Written by William Davies
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Thursday, 17 August 2006 |
Scribus brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOSX and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
 Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has rapidly developed into one of the premier desktop applications for Linux. Called by Newsforge, "..one of the killer applications for Linux", Scribus 1.2 brings new power and versatile tools for desktop publishing.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 August 2006 )
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