[OS X TeX] Re: White vs. Transparent?

[Victor Ivrii]

On 4/7/06, Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at mac.com> wrote:
> Le 7 avr. 06 à 09:01, Simon Spiegel a écrit :
>
> > Why would anybody who uses a Mac today boot into WinXP to use an
> > app which is available for the Mac? BootCamp will help those who
> > rely on some app which doesn't exist on the Mac, which is positive,
> > I don't see the reverse thing happening. I buy a Mac for the OSX
> > experience and not to run Windows.
>
> Try to play on a Mac a PowerPoint presentation prepared on Windows,
> and you'll see why! I have attempted to help colleagues, former
> Windows users, current OS X switchers, run on their new Mac
> PowerPoint presentation from their Windows days: generally it meant
> about 1/2 day or a full day of preparatory work, for each
> presentation of about 20 slides. All the equations were no longer
> visible on the Mac and needed to have their background changed one by
> one, encoding problems meant some mathematical characters had been
> changed to rubbish, alignments had to be redone one by one due to the
> differences between fonts on Windows and on the Mac, most animations
> (e.g. movies from lab experiments or animations of numerical
> simulations) weren't working any more and had to be re-included one
> by one, and so forth.

I observed the same with M$ Word and I explained to the poor soul who
prepared this what should be done with anyone calling himself a
mathematician and using this crapware.

>
> Needless to say, most people are too busy to spend that much time
> just to get a presentation running on a new platform, and give up
> once seeing the mess that this is. As a consequence, my colleagues
> ended up keeping their Windows laptop around, just to run these
> PowerPoint presentations. With a double-boot, you can manage all of
> this on the Mac. And so forth when having to fill in forms (for grant
> application, etc.) prepared on Word for Windows, not working on
> OpenOffice or AbiWord due to tables etc., and working badly on Word
> for Mac. Yes, of course you can lobby for the use of open formats,
> and the situation is indeed evolving, but generally you simply don't
> have the time.

I have the same problem with one grant in all the sciences managed by
Arts Council of Canada but they were kind enough to let me to fill by
a hand (and even awarded it despite my rambling about use proprietary
formats; now AFAIK they allow pdf)

I clearly believe that M$ use should be confronted. Few years ago
script junkies hired by the university made (a secure) access to our
salaries on-line available, but only for MSIE users (a lot of stupid
js). After a little exchange (via vice-president of the university)
these guys fixed it (first they resisted). This year they did the same
with another new service - but fixed after the first complain :-)
knowing that the rsistance is futile.

This little wars surely require some time - but winning them save it

>
--
========================
Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
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