this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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While I personally haven't run into the same roadblocks as you when using alternatives, I appreciate the counter-point and reality check.
You're doing it wrong. PDF with embedded javascript is a nightmare and it still doesn't make PDF equal to excel.
Better generate your documents with your favourite HTML templating engine from your DB and convert them to simple PDF in the last step.
Only had that experience with badly designed, macro ridden documents which there's no excuse for anyway nowadays. I use a lot of print templates (various label printers) and it works flawlessly.
Also, exporting a non MS file format usually imports fine in LibreOffice, even with complex documents.
The ability to quickly edit PDF makes it the office suite of my choice.
Yeah, but if your boss or client sends you a document that doesn't work you're not going to tell them "Uh well this is a badly formed document and you shouldn't embed scripts and it's your fault that my FOSS alternative application can't work with this". At least I hope you're not.
Of course I do and I expect my employees to report such incidents to IT. Such documents are common attack vectors.
In my experience, customers are not aware of failing interoperability or possible security threats and often grateful for such hints.
There's a reason why libreoffice (and I guess other office suits aswell), evince or antivirus show a big, fat warning when opening such documents. Surely there are cases were macros are useful or necessary, but if they have to leave the company, you're doing it wrong.
This talk might be interesting for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F2xMw3987I
Then you just don't know the law. There is no legislation that enforces Acrobat in any civilized country without alternative.
Quite the opposite: Send macroridden documents to any decently secure infrastructure and you get a big fat warning in the subject if it's not filtered entirely. Officials LOVE to do that extra call ensuring that this document is really from you before opening it and no phishing attempt...not.
Source: working >25 years in IT, >15 years for government IT
EDIT: we got some real Adobe Acrobat Fanboy here, eh? ;-)
FOSS in programs and appliances are OPEN SOURCE for a reason, consider many to be 'models' used to build upon. Your reason's are factual down to the specific applications/programs however try appending a new function in MSO or adding your on embeddings in Adobe to change the scaling. For those looking to make their programs work for them and have some experience in programming and time, FOSS is perfect to do so, others that use these apps and haven't the time to dedicate to customize features, import their own libs and assets and don't mind paying for it, indeed that may be the better option. 🐈⬛
I use non-FOSS for work, but I have a work PC where someone else pays for all of them.