[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Rachel Polanskis]

On 10/12/2010, at 4:22 PM, Steven Clark <steven.clark at internode.on.net> wrote:

> On 06/12/10 09:41, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>> On 06/12/2010, at 9:41 AM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
>> 
>>> Reminds me of my old man, whom insists of sending me screenshots not
>>> as JPEG (JPG) files or other graphic format, but rather does
>>> Alt-PrintScreen, and then opens OpenOffice.org and pastes the bitmap
>>> into an empty ODF document, and mails that to me.
>> I share your pain, Fernando! 
>> 
>> Last week, I received 12 Microsoft Word documents in an e-mail after requesting 12 jpeg images to be sent...
> *sigh*
> 
> all that extra, unnecessary effort because they don't understand what
> they're doing - just repeating what-worked-last-time.
>> It's simply insufficient training or awareness of options: people I work with needed to be trained to NOT sent Word or Powerpoint attachments when plain text would suffice.
> Seems we need ever more training, when a decent education would have
> sufficed in most cases ...

This even happens between those people supposedly IT skilled.   I often get DBA's and developers sending me windows bitmaps of error dialogue boxes (usually with a useless error message description) and am expected to be able to decipher their problems.  Firstly it is a hassle because I usually use PINE for email, so I have to configure it to shell out 
to an image viewer.  Then second it is just a waste of time and energy for all the players
because usual error is something obvious and obtuse like "permission denied" or "host unreachable".  So why not just say that?!   :(  

These days, I just reply to say I cannot read it and to just paste in the screen dump,
which usually leads to something worse.....


rachel

--
rachel polanskis 
<r.polanskis at uws.edu.au> 
<grove at zeta.org.au>