OT: MS Word question

Go to the file menu, click on SaveAs. In the dialog box click on the SaveAsType list at the bottom. Click down in the list and you get several versions of .txt from which to choose. You loose everything but text, including line breaks (unless you choose TextOnlyWithLineBreaks).

David Billington wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@djbillington.freeserve.co.uk:

This question has been answered.

Maybe they installed Acrobat (full version), which adds some icons to the toolbar to directly create (or create and e-mail) documents in PDF format.

I wish more people would do that, I'm tired of getting .doc files for newsletters and such like. They are not nearly as safe as .pdf files.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

There are also some freeware and/or shareware PDF writers available. I don't recall the names, but a google search should find them.

Bert

There's another possibility. Ted could download OpenOffice by Sun Microsystems, free.

and could then read the Word documents, without macros. Versions are available for just about any operating system.

They could, again, with OpenOffice. One of the "Save as" choices is .PDF. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to open a .PDF file, edit it, then save it as a .PDF. But documents created by almost any word processor is fair game.

Dale Scroggins

Oops. Not the "Save as" menu, but the "Export" menu. Sorry.

Dale

Ted:

Another poster already gave you the "save as..." info, but you might want to consider .rtf format if you have a reader on your machine that handles rich text. I worked in a mixed computing environment for years, and we got in the habit of using RTF as our exchange medium among Word, WP, Mac's and Unix. It steadily improved over time. RTF readers are pretty easily available for all these environments; you might already have one on your machine.

The advantage, of course, is that RTF preserves most or all of the formatting information.

Regards,

Bob

Recent versions of Ghostscript will do it. (At least the unix versions.)

And -- for *viewing* pdf without Adobe's product, try xpdf on unix systems.

Enjoy, DoN.

Yep - though I wonder whether it has been ported to OS-2 yet. That is what Ted is running, IIRC.

[ ... ]

Note that some PDF files are locked to prevent modification. Individuals seldom do this, but companies sending out product information documents are much more likely to do this.

Good Luck, DoN.

Ted -

How about cut and paste. Cut from the face of word and paste into Emacs or whatever. I can do it with PDF - or word.

I'll help you from this end if you need more help.

Martin

Already answered and yes you will lose formatting. Macros won't run.

The easiest and cheapest is to get PDF995 from would you believe

It is free and sets up as a "virtual printer". When you enter Ctrl+P PDF995 is one of the printer choices. When you select it and print the pdf file ends up in surprise ...The PDF995 folder. Took me a while to find the first one.

The pdf file can be read with Adobe Reader also a free program available from

Adobe Reader will read and print (on paper) pdf files.

Sadly, the only way I know of to do this is to write a fairly hefty check to Adobe. That is one of the drawbacks to a propriatary format. Kind of gives the creator a lock on some aspects of the process. On the other hand, it DOES suck a lot less than most ways of distributing documents across the net. Now...if they would ONLY port Pagemaker, Distiller, etc, to Linux! Regards Dave Mundt

Unfortunately they state: "We support Windows 95, 98, 2000 and Me, NT

4.0 and XP."

Ted

I do have something that will deal with RTF but that assumes they have enough computer smarts to output from Word in that format. They couldn't get plain text right. :-(

Ted

Take a look at

. It's available for Linux.

Ted

Correct and, according to there web site, it is not available for OS/2. However, Ghost Script/View is. I downloaded and installed and it works. Now I have to see if it can be persuaded to print to an elderly Epson dot matrix printer.

Ted

That was a failure. They still couldn't get it right.

As some suggested, they probably bought something.

Open Ofice does not appear to be available for OS/2.

Star Office is supposed to be able to do it too but it's huge and I have limited drive space.

Ghost View and Ghost Script are available for OS/2 as well as Linux and 'doze. I downloaded and successfully installed them yesterday. I can now read the documents on the screen but have yet to learn how to print them on an elderly Epson dot matrix printer. I have heard runours that it's possible. Of course, any coulour will be lost but that is of little concern at the moment.

So far, I have been able to export pages from Ghost View as .BMPs and print them from PMView which can also convert them to .PNGs. These are

*far* more efficient for saving images. For the small number of pages for which I need hard copy, this will do for now.

Thanks for all the tips and suggestions. Perhaps the above comments may help someone with similar problems.

Ted

That would have to be done at their end. Not much hope of that. :-(

Ted