I get some paperwork mailed to me that I need to fill out, but I get it right as I'm leaving on a week long ski trip (yeah, baby!). The paperwork is in Microsoft Word format -- something I rarely get (but used to -- see long story below) and don't have a word processor that reads Microsoft doc files. Worse, I'm supposed to print, sign, and fax these back -- "or send pdfs" (presumibly from scans). I left my printer (a dot matrix) and my scanner at home, and I need to somehow digitally insert my signature along with text into blanks. I tried downloading OpenOffice, hoping it would convert the files into images for me (see long story #2 below) and abandoned that. media-convert.com came to the rescue, giving me PostScript versions, but my pstoppm failed with a GhostScript stack trace/dump. Invoking GhostScript directly had the same problem. Downloaded the latest version and built it from source; same problem. Back to media-convert.com for pdfs, and thankfully, pdftoppm does the trick and gives me nice bitmaps. xpaint doesn't throw up scrollbars and it wouldn't know how to nicely paste my signature in anyway. While I could have photographed my signature with the digital camera and pased it in, I knew this was coming, and scanned a few signatures before I left. xv, ditto. So, gimp it is. gimp confuses me. After much trial and error, and coredumps, I found the signatures could be pasted in by selecting a large box in the target document, pasting the signature over, right clicking, moving to "select", then "by color", then clicking on the white part, then right clicking on it, going for "edit", then "clear", which clears away the white pixels, leaving transparency. The last hurdle I struggled with was that I couldn't check my work and verify the result until I named the layer by double-clicking the auto-generated layer name in the layers display. Since other auto-named layers had no such restriction, this confounded me. To move the layer with the positioning tool, you actually need to hit a lit pixel in it, or else it moves the background and everything else, which is pointless and obnoxious. Then off to the text tool to do some data entry in my virtual forms.
The two long stories are below. They're unnecessary detail, but here's what I got from the experience...
Sending Microsoft Word documents around quickly break out of the realm of all-digital, at least for not-especially-savvy users. Better created documents would have actual form blanks in them, but that still doesn't help with the signature -- but that's a tall order. More people seem to know how to create little PHP Web appies with forms than Microsoft Word documents with forms, and there's certainly more flexibility in processing the data in the PHP route. It would rule to be able to create Microsoft Access like forms and publish them quickly and easily to the Web. The Unix mindset is very different from the Windows one; Unix geeks never send me stuff and suggest I print it out unless its something like the do-it-yourself decahedrathon globe or something that intrinsically has to be on paper in a 3d world. Regardless, it would be neato to build a Web appie that automates much of what I had to do manually, by allowing users to upload a document that becomes the page background, and allows the user to type over top of it, and even upload and place images with the option of making the background color transparent (png!). Office workflow needs help, badly. None of those things are the answer. Google is probably closer to that. I guess I'm fixated on stop-gaps for a world that refuses to change, as a way of easing some of us over, out of this misery.
Long story 1: While working on Perl 6 Now, I'd trade Microsoft Word documents back and forth with the copy editor, editor, and the production department, and for the purpose, I had Microsoft Word 97 running under wine. A year went by and I suffered Abiword fine (which crashes a lot when trying to do things but works passably as a light-weight viewer), so I blew away Microsoft Word 97. Later, ajax-write.com launches, and Google starts converting doc files to HTML right there in their Webmail, so I blow away Abiword to make some space, and out of spite.
Long story 2: I tried downloading OpenOffice (which took overnight) only to find that their "Linux 86" version was actually "RedHat Linux x86" -- it was a tarball full of rpms, not a universal binary as one would suspect. This is after I went through the pain to sniff HTTP traffic to pick out the URL of a mirror their stupid Web form redirected me to so I could use wget instead of Mozilla/Seamonkey/Firefox, which is idiotic about downloads, never resuming an interrupted connection even though HTTP specifies how long a document is and allows for resumes. For other reasons relating to nothing working right, I can't install rpms.
I wrote a nice article over at Avogato about how office automation was done in the Unix days, predating the rise of Microsoft Windows -- it's interesting, powerful, and mostly forgotten.
-scott
Re:Ok, so don't run UNIX
scrottie on 2006-12-12T08:53:16
Brilliant. I'll not run Unix, even though, as I said, I go for years not needing anything from the Microsoft world, because every few years I need to have Microsoft Word installed -- even though I did and can install it in Unix but happened to have purged it some time before I took off.
Please. Do me a favor. Don't post in my blog ever again. Please don't even read it. Go away. Leave me alone. The last thing I want to see in a blog about the insufferable stupidity I must suffer is more insufferable stupidity.
-scottRe:Ok, so don't run UNIX
jjore on 2006-12-12T16:32:22
Geeez. I was posting that with a grimace on my face while I did it. It's my fault that my tone didn't come through. I spend my days on UNIX and UNIX-like OSes. If you can believe it, I was commisserating with you about the state of the world.
That said, it is occasionally easier to just bite the bullet and do something manually. My partner has an XP machine which I'd probably use for this kind of thing but if that weren't available there's always Kinko's or something similar.
I've done all the kinds of stuff you mention in your blog and while it's possible... whooo. Life's too short to waste inventing workarounds that will never really be useful again.
BTW, you were a jerk just now. I hope it's just the stress speaking.Re:Ok, so don't run UNIX
scrottie on 2006-12-13T18:27:53
Yes, I am a jerk. That's beside the point and was the subject of a previous post. Yes, I would have hobbled over to a Windows machine if I were at home -- I thoroughly outlined why that wasn't an option in this case. Again, the subject of the article was the clash and my notes from brainstomring remedies. You were trying to be funny or empathetic -- fine, but you'll enjoy more success here and other places that loathe the Slashdot mindset if you comment with a demonstration of understanding of the article you're commenting on and a willingness to accept the premises it outlines, explain your differening conclusions, add pespective, and generally, stay on subject. You did the opposite. You dismissed the situation and took it to a lower common demoniminator. Here's a real-life example. If you come across a conversation where people are talking about their two favorite teams, and enjoying their detailed conversation, you don't jump in and say "I don't like baseball". Perhaps someone else will wander up in middle of the new disucussion about whether baseball is likeable and comment that "sports are dumb". And then this degenerates into a conversation about how dumb each person is. People in this example are not participating in the conversation, but instead hijacking it with something far less interesting to the participants. The very thing they say is in itself a refusal to talk about the subject until their unsolvable replacement debate is solved, so progress is only backwards, to the less specific, more heavily covered topics, and away from the intricacies. Small minded buffoons systematically use these tactics to appear of some intelligence to the casual observer who only notes that they've become an active part of the disucssion and apparently "won" on a few points not noticing it's at the expense of the overall conversation.
And the fact that there are no other participants but myself in this conversation is something I'm already aware of. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm lecturing you on how to comment on a blog. Looking at the hoardes of people on Slashdot missing these subtleties suggests to me that I do in fact need to be vigilant. I'm also aware you'll probably consider this an affront. It's not my attention to offend -- not in this note. I only readily offend as I see no other option. The previous note had a goal of offending as a way of chasing you off. If you can by some miracle look past that and then decide to honor my demands for comments on my blog, and then I will welcome your comments.Re:Ok, so don't run UNIX
scrottie on 2006-12-12T08:59:20
pngtopnm application.png | ppmquant 256 | ppmtogif | gif2ps | ps2pdf - - > application.pdf
They mail me back and while they're able to read the PNGs, they'd rather have PDFs. Fine. There you go. Whatever.
Meanwhile, I'm realizing I've lost touch with everyone who can vouch for me -- especially old co-workers. I don't even have good phone numbers for friends that I see all the time on MUD.
For those who make it a point of missing the point, the article was about an impedence miss-match between Unix and Microsoft ways of doing things; it wasn't about which operating system I should run (that was discussed in previous posts); that one party is running Microsoft Windows and another a Unix-like OS is a given for the purpose of this article. If you miss that point, you'll miss the rest.
-scottRe:Ok, so don't run UNIX
scrottie on 2006-12-12T09:07:22
I'm talking to myself here. If you reply, make damn sure you're caught up on the conversation.
The pngtopnm application.png | ppmquant 256 | ppmtogif | gif2ps | ps2pdf - - > application.pdf above was in addition to what I was already doing, specifically the doc->pdf conversion through media-convert.com, then pdftoppm, then through gimp...
-scott
