Re: [Fsfe-uk] New FSFE Free PDF Readers Campaign

[Sam Tuke]

On Tuesday 14 September 2010 23:33:09 Jon Grant wrote:
> This page looks good, but is incredibly wide.

Submitted as bug to our web team,

> I'd be even more interested in government websites providing their
> documents in non-PDF format though. Something like HMTL, or even
> OpenOffice format etc.  How about launching a campaign to get
> governments to stop using PDFs instead of web pages? It is such a pain
> to try edit/re-use anything published in only a PDF file.

PDF is an ISO standard for which there are several Free Software 
implementations. As such, it is one of the better file formats for those 
organisations to use (much better than .doc or part of an online only viewer 
application).

I fully agree with you that PDF has some serious accessibility and portability 
issues. By itself however this is not a concern directly related to Free 
Software.

FSFE has a separate campaign for promoting the use of Open Document Format; 
information can be found here:

http://documentfreedom.org/
http://www.fsfe.org/news/2010/news-20100302-01.en.html
http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/os.en.html

As an ongoing effort FSFE encourages governments and the EU as a whole to use 
this open standard, and has had major victories in this field.

Thanks,

Sam.

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