Re-read his comment. He's not saying bookmarking isn't in PDF, he's saying you don't get a bookmarked PDF if you print to a file then use ps2pdf (which is true) or use OO (which, I think, isn't).
In the next paragraph, the OP said
I suspect that this is the part that Adobe is balking at -- that anyone would care and duplicate the beyond-standard work that they do with PDFmaker, to the point where someone with MS office really doesn't need to contact them anymore.
The way I read, I thought that in OP's opinion tagging and bookmarking are beyond-standard, i.e. not a part of the (pdf) standard. My interpretation could have been wrong though.
pdflatex can and does produce bookmarked pdf's rather happily with the hyperref package (at least since 2002). So I am pretty sure that the bookmarking features are very much a part of the standard.
Please keep in mind that Adobe has refused to comment, and all we hear are the Microsoft comments and interpretations thereof. There has to be more to it than meets the eye. If I were Adobe, I would be very very skittish when dealing with Microsoft. Microsoft is a dangerous predator, plain and simple (not that Adobe is a saint)
My post was in repsonse to the guy who said that not everyone has the budget to buy (rather pricey) Matlab licenses. Well, GNU project to the rescue! Try GNU-Octave, a fine software with a similar interface.
Now, to address the point you tried to make: If you want to plot Column E vs Column C in Excel, to the best of my knowledge, you are SOL in Excel (You can plot C vs E though). The fix is to copy/move columns to do that. Same thing if you want to plot abs or sin of any column, or any other function for that matter.
To plot in octave/matlab, the steps are >> x = load('filename.csv'); >> plot(x(:,1),x(:,2); # Column A vs Column B >> hold; >> grid; >> plot(x(:,5),x(:,3)); # Column E vs Column C
Pros: 1. No arbitrary limits on the number of columns/row, besides your hardware 2. Save these few commands in a script.m file, you you now have a programming interface. 3. No change in user interface is going to stump you when Office 2012 comes out 4. More power: you can plot rows against rows rather than just doing columns against columns, etc etc (plot x(1,:),x(2:,)) will do the trick 5. Amenable to piping, scripting and all the good stuff. Want to read n different files , plot some variables stored in the said files, and print them all out with consistent formatting into a n page or a n/2 page pdf that you can quickly look through? In alphabetical order of the filename? In chronological order? No problemo, done in 5 minutes. Want to do it for every file in your home or project directory? 6. The data is stored in ieee-754 floats to save space, no problemo. Interleaved ieee-754 floats with variable interleave factor? No problemo.
I could go on and on really.
Cons: 1. Some sort of a learning curve, but with a much higher reward
My claim is that for anything but the most trivial tasks, excel is not a tool, it is an obstruction. The user is much better served by learning
Having said that, my excel and office experience is limited, so there is every chance that what I have said is wrong/biased. You might be able to do some things in Visual Basic, but is it cross platform? Will it work 10 years from now?
LaTeX + Gnuplot is all that I need anyway, with a smattering of perl/octave.
Then there is also GNU-Octave (www.octave.org) and Scilab. If you know Matlab, you will be right at home with either of the two. Now if you are a Simulink user like I am, then...
-a.
Two reasons for this post
1. I did a -1 offtopic to somebody when it should have been +1 interesting, this post fixes it (somewhat)
2. I for one care about the philosophy, not just the product.
It is this philosophy of share and share alike that has given us a lot of good stuff (to all your whiners, when you have written half as much Free code as the GNU/FSF, please come back and complain). I use a lot of GNU code day in and day out (cygwin at work, gentoo at home) and I am thankful for all the goodness.
When Linux started working on a Free OS, where did he get his shell and compiler from? If the shell and compiler had not been available for porting, do you think Linux would be where it is today? Could a 20 year old Linus have written a compiler and userland to go with his kernel? I think not.
And comparing GNU code to Crappy American Cars from 70s and 80s ? The crappy american cars come out of Redmond, not FSF.
My first and only brush with MS-Office was back in late 2000 (IIRC Office 2k on Win2k). I had to co-author a paper, and this particular conference only wanted MS-Word documents. Why should a word processor re-paginate when the only difference in 2 machines is the print driver.
Since early 2001, I have been a LaTeX user and I refuse to touch WYSIWYG (nay WYSI What you don't want) word processors with a 10 foot long pole. I have worked in engineering department of a Fortune 20 company, and stuck to LaTeX. My presentations are done with the LaTeX + beamer package (beamer.sourceforge.net), and all documents are done using LaTeX. I use gnuplot for plotting/graphing and people are regularly wowed by my documents.
I have seen WYSIWYG word processors in general and MS-Word in particular reduce grown up men to sobbing heaps.
Having said that OOo seems to be less bug-prine than the comparable MS offerings. Recent example: co-worker has Office XP and Acrobat (the full package), and he wanted to convert a complex 128 slide ppt to pdf. The pdf always came out with (a few) garbled alphabets on his workstation. I imported the ppt into OOo, and pdf export worked a flawless document (6 Meg OOo pdf vs 12 Meg Acrobat pdf). I had to download and install OOo first though. And this was OOo 1.1.4, not OOo 2.0.
So to summarize, WYSIWYG word processors are a huge waste of productivity. Try + LaTeX, the initial learning curve is steep, but the productivity gains are nothing short of phenomenal.
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I killed the electric car, but I did not discharge the battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch
Brent Hatch is Orrin's Hatch son.
Re-read his comment. He's not saying bookmarking isn't in PDF, he's saying you don't get a bookmarked PDF if you print to a file then use ps2pdf (which is true) or use OO (which, I think, isn't).
In the next paragraph, the OP said
I suspect that this is the part that Adobe is balking at -- that anyone would care and duplicate the beyond-standard work that they do with PDFmaker, to the point where someone with MS office really doesn't need to contact them anymore.
The way I read, I thought that in OP's opinion tagging and bookmarking are beyond-standard, i.e. not a part of the (pdf) standard. My interpretation could have been wrong though.
Thanks
-a.
pdflatex can and does produce bookmarked pdf's rather happily with the hyperref package (at least since 2002). So I am pretty sure that the bookmarking features are very much a part of the standard.
Please keep in mind that Adobe has refused to comment, and all we hear are the Microsoft comments and interpretations thereof. There has to be more to it than meets the eye. If I were Adobe, I would be very very skittish when dealing with Microsoft. Microsoft is a dangerous predator, plain and simple (not that Adobe is a saint)
Thanks
-a.
spectecjr,
.m file, you you now have a programming interface.
My post was in repsonse to the guy who said that not everyone has the budget to buy (rather pricey) Matlab licenses. Well, GNU project to the rescue! Try GNU-Octave, a fine software with a similar interface.
Now, to address the point you tried to make:
If you want to plot Column E vs Column C in Excel, to the best of my knowledge, you are SOL in Excel (You can plot C vs E though). The fix is to copy/move columns to do that. Same thing if you want to plot abs or sin of any column, or any other function for that matter.
To plot in octave/matlab, the steps are
>> x = load('filename.csv');
>> plot(x(:,1),x(:,2); # Column A vs Column B
>> hold;
>> grid;
>> plot(x(:,5),x(:,3)); # Column E vs Column C
Pros:
1. No arbitrary limits on the number of columns/row, besides your hardware
2. Save these few commands in a script
3. No change in user interface is going to stump you when Office 2012 comes out
4. More power: you can plot rows against rows rather than just doing columns against columns, etc etc (plot x(1,:),x(2:,)) will do the trick
5. Amenable to piping, scripting and all the good stuff. Want to read n different files , plot some variables stored in the said files, and print them all out with consistent formatting into a n page or a n/2 page pdf that you can quickly look through? In alphabetical order of the filename? In chronological order? No problemo, done in 5 minutes. Want to do it for every file in your home or project directory?
6. The data is stored in ieee-754 floats to save space, no problemo. Interleaved ieee-754 floats with variable interleave factor? No problemo.
I could go on and on really.
Cons:
1. Some sort of a learning curve, but with a much higher reward
My claim is that for anything but the most trivial tasks, excel is not a tool, it is an obstruction. The user is much better served by learning
Having said that, my excel and office experience is limited, so there is every chance that what I have said is wrong/biased. You might be able to do some things in Visual Basic, but is it cross platform? Will it work 10 years from now?
LaTeX + Gnuplot is all that I need anyway, with a smattering of perl/octave.
Thanks
-a.
Then there is also GNU-Octave (www.octave.org) and Scilab. If you know Matlab, you will be right at home with either of the two. Now if you are a Simulink user like I am, then... -a.
Two reasons for this post
1. I did a -1 offtopic to somebody when it should have been +1 interesting, this post fixes it (somewhat)
2. I for one care about the philosophy, not just the product.
It is this philosophy of share and share alike that has given us a lot of good stuff (to all your whiners, when you have written half as much Free code as the GNU/FSF, please come back and complain). I use a lot of GNU code day in and day out (cygwin at work, gentoo at home) and I am thankful for all the goodness.
When Linux started working on a Free OS, where did he get his shell and compiler from? If the shell and compiler had not been available for porting, do you think Linux would be where it is today? Could a 20 year old Linus have written a compiler and userland to go with his kernel? I think not. And comparing GNU code to Crappy American Cars from 70s and 80s ? The crappy american cars come out of Redmond, not FSF.
My first and only brush with MS-Office was back in late 2000 (IIRC Office 2k on Win2k). I had to co-author a paper, and this particular conference only wanted MS-Word documents. Why should a word processor re-paginate when the only difference in 2 machines is the print driver.
Since early 2001, I have been a LaTeX user and I refuse to touch WYSIWYG (nay WYSI What you don't want) word processors with a 10 foot long pole. I have worked in engineering department of a Fortune 20 company, and stuck to LaTeX. My presentations are done with the LaTeX + beamer package (beamer.sourceforge.net), and all documents are done using LaTeX. I use gnuplot for plotting/graphing and people are regularly wowed by my documents.
I have seen WYSIWYG word processors in general and MS-Word in particular reduce grown up men to sobbing heaps.
Having said that OOo seems to be less bug-prine than the comparable MS offerings. Recent example: co-worker has Office XP and Acrobat (the full package), and he wanted to convert a complex 128 slide ppt to pdf. The pdf always came out with (a few) garbled alphabets on his workstation. I imported the ppt into OOo, and pdf export worked a flawless document (6 Meg OOo pdf vs 12 Meg Acrobat pdf). I had to download and install OOo first though. And this was OOo 1.1.4, not OOo 2.0.
So to summarize, WYSIWYG word processors are a huge waste of productivity. Try + LaTeX, the initial learning curve is steep, but the productivity gains are nothing short of phenomenal.