ARJ

Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Why open file formats matter

Posted on | August 22, 2010 | No Comments

Cleaning up on my hard drive, I came across a couple of .wks (MS Works spreadsheet) documents from 1994-95. I don’t really need to get at the contents of these files right now, but I think it could be useful to be able to open them at some point. So I tried to see if I could open them with any of the office programs I have on my computer (MS Office, Numbers, OpenOffice, NeoOffice).

MS Works used to be a quite widespread office suite that came with a lot of machines back in those days, and it is actually still in sale. Therefore you would imagine that MS programs should be able to open files from previous versions. Strangely enough, I discovered that MS spreadsheet flagship Excel can’t open the old MS Works files.

I haven’t tried the Windows version of Excel yet, but if that doesn’t work I guess I have to start up an old computer that may have MS Works installed (or pay for some conversion program). Yet another reason for working with open file formats.

Category: Thoughts
Tags: > >

Writing complex documents

Posted on | August 18, 2010 | 2 Comments

I have been using LaTeX for most of my more advanced writing needs for so many years, that I tend to forget that there are so few other good options out there for writing what could be called “complex” documents, i.e. book-sized documents with a good portion of notes, pictures, links, etc.

I just had to help out in trying to create a large document based on 30+ individual documents in MS Word. Word offers the possibility of creating a ”master document” for embedding multiple individual documents. This (in theory) makes it possible to create one large table of contents, internal links, etc. However, in practice this turns out to be a nightmare of dimensions: styles change, links disappear or stop working, the table of contents finds most things, but with wrong styles, page numbers don’t get updated properly…

I’m glad I don’t rely on MS Word for such things, and I feel sorry for everyone that has to go through so much pain to create a large and complex document. Unfortunately, the rather steep learning curve of LaTeX makes it difficult to suggest it to people that are not inclined for writing code themselves. But what other options are there? OpenOffice might work a little better, but it is based on the same idea of mixing content and layout as Word. Layout programs are usually not particularly good for writing text, not to say footnotes, bibliography, etc. Scrivener is good for structuring large portions of text, but lacks most other thing required in scientific writing (and it is OSX only). Adobe FrameMaker could have been a solution, had it not been Windows only and fairly costly.

Any suggestions for other software would be welcome, and I will pass them on to the next unfortunate Word user I meet.

Category: Thoughts
Tags: >

UiO goes social 2

Posted on | August 18, 2010 | No Comments

A few weeks ago I mentioned that University of Oslo now openly supports RSS- and Twitter-feeds from the official employee web sites. Now I see that social linking has also been embedded in the new profile, as can be seen for example here.

These types of links have been around for some years, but many academic institutions seem to have been very reluctant when it comes to jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon. I don’t think adding a facebook/twitter button will change the world, but I highly support all initiatives that make universities more open.

uio-social2-480.jpg

Category: Thoughts
Tags: > > > >

Opened for comments (again)

Posted on | August 9, 2010 | No Comments

I have opened for comments on the blog again! The comment option was closed a year ago after having received a couple of hundred thousand comments in a couple of days. Now I have updated to the latest version of WordPress, and have activated new spam filters. Hopefully, this can keep the spam out this time. At least it is worth a try.

Happy commenting!

Category: Software
Tags: > > >

PDF merge in preview

Posted on | August 9, 2010 | No Comments

After I began using PDFCompress for minimizing PDF files, the only reason I have had for using the full Adobe Acrobat has been to combine PDFs. Now I realize that since OS 10.5 this functionality has been built into Preview. I guess I should really start reading the release notes of OSes and applications a bit more carefully, since I managed to get to 10.6 before I found out about this feature.

Anyways, it is super easy to combine files: Just open in Preview and drag the icon(s) from one file on top of the icon in another (see demonstration).

Looking around for this solution I also discovered the free iCombiner application, which may be even easier to work with, and especially when having many PDF files that I want to combine (e.g. lots of chapters in a book).

So now I don’t really see any good reasons for upgrading my old Acrobat to a newer version any longer.

Category: Software
Tags: > >
« go back — keep looking »