In a recent entry I gave props to OpenOffice, and talked about the ease with which one can produce PDFs with the latest version. Well, today I finished my syllabi and exported each of them as PDFs: English 317: Introduction to British Literature I and English 350: The Eighteenth-Century Novel. Seems to work pretty well, but I don’t know why the file sizes are so honking big.
With OS X, you can save files as PDFs from AppleWorks, too. I haven’t done it much to see how the file size is affected, but it’s sweet to be able to do right out of the box.
That’s very cool. Jeff tells me that while the PDF format is open for other developers to build into their word processors, the compression algorithm that results in smaller file sizes is proprietary: only Adobe’s products produce non-honking files.