Busy, busy

Real Life^TM^ has been busy lately. Mostly because I’ve been writing a course for the Society of Freelance Editors and Proofreaders on Medical Editing; they’ve organised a one-day ‘Professional development’ conference and I’m giving two of the four sessions (the ones involving the science – genetics and gene nomenclature, molecular-biology techniques, chemical nomenclature, measurement, and statistics). This has involved quite a lot of writing – my manual comes to over 15,000 words, and the handouts total over 8500, plus slides. And meeting the deadline has meant less time for blogging (reading or writing). Sorry about that :-)

However, that’s now past, thanks to the excellent OpenOffice suite, a full-featured word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet for £0. Yup, that’s right, it’s free gratis. And, even better, it’s also free libre – OpenOffice is Open Source software, so no vendor tie in! It’s got the usual features (including support for MS Office filetypes), plus one rather useful one – direct one-click PDF generation. For quickly producing copies to email out for comments, this is excellent. However, although the quality of the output is mostly perfect, bitmap images are downsampled by the inbuilt PDF generator so, for the final proofs, I produced the PDF using the KDE environment’s very neat built-in PDF generator, which is just another print queue. Yet another plus for KDE and GNU/Linux as a productive office desktop!

So, on Monday week (16th May), I’ll be giving the talks to 60 or so people, down in London. I’ll report back on how it went!

pax et bonum

Article posted at 4:32pm on 04 May 2005
Category: Computers, Life, Science, Struggling, General