Python Tutorial Was: Guido's regrets: filter and map

[Fernando Pérez]

David Brown wrote:

> If you can find it, there is a free (!) powerpoint viewer from Microsoft,
> along with word and excel viewers.  They are a bit old, and may not support
> the latest formats - they may not even still be available.  But they are
> very much faster than the real MS Office programs, and don't support macro
> viruses.

Which I'm sure works wonderfully well under Linux :)

> Of course, you can always use Open Office for PowerPoint files.

Which I have and use when there's no other option. But as much as it's great 
to have OO, it still takes _ages_ to load (on a very fast laptop with gobs of 
RAM), and doesn't look on-screen quite as nice as PDF. PDF is simply an 
excellent format for the job at hand: portable distribution of documents 
which retain their original look pretty much perfectly.

Fortunately I live in a world where people communicate in Latex, PostScript 
and PDF, so I simply very rarely have to bother with Microsoft file formats. 
And I try to keep it that way :) LyX and XEmacs are enough for pretty much 
all I do document-wise (with OpenOffice for the occasional spreadsheet).

Cheers,

f.