I once failed a uni assignment, because the teachers assistant wrote remarks on a pdf in a way that’s only viewable in adobe’s products.
She failed us because “we ignored her remarks”. Had no idea they were there.
Tbh it’s probably less of an Adobe problem and more due to the absolute mess that is PDF annotations.
Despite being a defined open standard, most free PDF viewers either don’t support them (zathura etc), or fuck them up (GNOME evince). Even some of the viewers that do support them like Okular need extra configuration.
Unironically Firefox as a PDF viewer actually has the best support for PDF annotations.
The state of PDF Readers on Linux - Discussion - It’s FOSS Community - https://itsfoss.community/t/the-state-of-pdf-readers-on-linux/12798
Ooh I would fucking LAY into her in the review if she did that, and cause a stink to the dean. That shit would’ve pissed me off so bad. I hate when people expect you to be telepathic like that.
To be honest she probably didn’t even know that the comments were only visible to Adobe product readers, but that’s still infuriating as hell
All pdfs must be flattened! You just never know what people will use so flatten.
Had the same in gymnasium, eventually got it overturned via bitching about it. Notes wouldnt even show up on their webapp : /
Mine accepted both. The professor read it from a web app anyway.
🤮
agreed
Okay, I just want to say I blame schools for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computing. School sysadmins are always dazzled by the shiny looking gifts that Microsoft gives them, ensuring the next generation of Microsoft useds is ready.
Really?
They’re almost universally Chromebooks and the Google suite for schools these days…
A couple years ago I interned for computer support at an elementary school in NYC. Most students had Chromebooks and Gsuite, K-2nd grade had iPads. Teachers had Lenovo laptops with Windows 10 and Office365.
…and until very recently, the discount for m365 was pretty neat, I gather.
Huh, that’s interesting. I’m not aware of what my kids teachers have had to use for themselves (I think the highschool might be MS-based?), but the “client side” has always been in Gsuite for over a decade
yeah but that’s fairly recent.
when i was in school in the late 90s it was all microsoft all the time. we had courses specifically on MicrosoftTM WordTM. that sort of indoctrination isn’t visible in the workplace until the people going through it are old enough to work.
To be fair, that’s about all there was… Corels (?) WordPerfect was ass, for sure. Office 97 was freaking amazing.
Although, I was a product of the time as well.
I used Applix on Unix / Linux and it was fine.
sure, but computers are so much more than office suites.
I don’t believe you
/s
our lab computers ran novell netware, which definitely told me that microsoft wasn’t all there was. but yeah, it definitely conditioned an entire generation into only understanding windows.
To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn’t have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can’t remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)
NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I’d argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.
You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)
I graduated in 2011, and same. My high school had a pretty janky mix of various Dell Inspiron towers, running mostly Windows XP but with a handful of Windows 2000 and ME machines that for some reason (prolly hardware too old) escaped their upgrades. We went through impressively comprehensive MS Office training and even Computer Tech classes (essentially an intro to an intro to computer science where we learned data concepts and built a PC).
A few years later, 90% of those machines had been scrapped, the mandatory courses were all gone and the kids all had cheap crappy Chromebooks. Now any tech courses are just electives and the students are expected to magically know how to use the software they’re required to use. (Because “they’re young, of course they know it!” Nevermind that they’ve only used iPads since birth).
Consequently, any class involving a computer, even if it’s just word processing for English essays and such, has the teacher taking time out of instruction to show the students how to use the stuff. Otherwise there are problems. It’s a sorry state of affairs and a lot more kids are getting left behind when it comes to tech. Google might be the worst thing happening to education now if it weren’t for the GOP.
i was a ta in uni in 2011-2015 and while ipad babies weren’t a thing yet we did definitely have to explain to some people what files were. as far as i understand from my contacts at the university it it’s way worse now.
Ohhh, I can sign off on this.
The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.
This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.
K-12 use Google, University use Microsoft
Yes I really liked the “microsoft excel and spreadsheets” class everyone had to take for 1-2 whole years. The tools designed for us to learn basics within weeks and discover features naturally over time.
I mean imagine how many negative side effects on education there would be if we just spent one or two weeks learning KStars or Geogebra or Kalzium.
Don’t worry tho cause with microsoft backing openai I am sure every student will be given a set of chatgpt premium accounts to “help” them in their learning. Universities are already doing it en masse.
You lose some you lose some.
Schools could have used that time they were “teaching” the Office suite to give an introduction to unix, programming, and the basics of how the internet functions. I had to read and analyze Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Homer and memorize the names and formulas of 33 polyatomic ions. Computing education to the same depth should have been and should be required as it was required for the other subjects.
Knowledge is power.
We understand a very small subset of what we use every day, and that can only be catastrophic.
Haven’t used word in over 20 years and have no intention of ever using it again.
OpenOffice baby!
*libre office
Yes. I know, it’s more popular than open office but I’ve used open office for so long now I don’t want to switch.
Do you my guy but running an office suite that hasn’t been patched in 11 years is a major security risk. (This is assuming you aren’t exclusively creating and saving documents, but are also opening documents you recieve or download).
Actually now that you mention it I don’t think I downloaded an ODT documenting forever in a day I mean probably decades.
But you are right of course there is a security risk but fron what I understand it is being patched just not actively updated?
downloaded an ODT documenting
Doesn’t really matter what document format it is, I wouldn’t dare using OO anymore. Maybe they still patch critical CVEs, and maybe no one even attempts exploits because it’s basically just in maintenance mode, but you never know…
Change isn’t fun, but I don’t think that UI-wise Libreoffice is such a big leap?
It is not a leap at all. Was seamless for me.
btw libreoffice is just a continuation of openoffice development
OpenOffice 💀 Dude that thing doesn’t get a proper update since 2014, the most they do today is code style changes!
Indeed the libreoffice team wrote them a letter in 2020 about this: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
Works great for any and all word processing and spreadsheet that I need.
I don’t do that much of it anyway so I don’t really need anything more than open office.
Libreoffice is so nice. I also use onlyoffice on my phone, and have liked it so far.
most of them accept pdfs so if thats the case for you just write the assignment in typst or latex and compile to pdf
This is the way.
Mine accepted rtf.
Another proprietary Microsoft format:
Wasn’t .docx also supposed to be an open standard but M$ kept fucking with the implementation so it would only work in Office?
Yes, it technically is a standard, but because it’s an ISO standard you have to pay for I wouldn’t call it open. https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html but people have different definitions of what an open standard is and I’m not trying to critique them.
Isn’t it open? It works with Dropbox and macOS Numbers opens .docx and saves as .docx.
So does LibreOffice, but they’ve been called out multiple times for purposefully making the format overly complex to make it as hard as possible to reliable read and write to it.
I genuinely think they’re just incompetent lol
You should see the windows xp source code
You should see the windows xp source code
The rapidly dwindling sanity of windows programmers as expressed through code comments
Certified classic
be careful with tainting yourself with proprietary crap though
So it’s an “open standard”, not in the sense that anybody can contribute to the development, but in the sense that the details of the standard are open and you can learn about them.
The format itself is an XML version of the existing Office document formats, and they grew organically over decades with random bugs, features, and bug compatibilities with other programs. e.g. There will be a random flag on an object that makes no sense but is necessary for interoperating with some Lotus 1-2-3 files that a company had, who then worked with Microsoft to support back it in the 90s. Things you can’t change, nobody really cares about, but get written down because the software already implements it (and will emit sometimes)
Most of my professors prefer pdf
Best thing I ever saw was an Italian cooking class that sent recipes as an ODT, and then 20 minutes later as a DOCX as an afterthought for the Americans.
Why not pdf?
Because the chef didn’t know how to do that? I dunno.
Nick Offerman after getting Jumanji’ed
Personally complain to the it crew and you get that look.
I can smell this pic.*
*Not a compliment
I use RTF because it works on most systems out of the box.
I write my papers in markdown. Simple to write, easy to paste into Discord or Lemmy, and you can use pandoc to instantly turn it into any format you like.
that’s an old looking William Riker
It’s the root mean square of Riker.
Well played
It’s the right thing to complain about that kind of stuff and to do it officially.
