Getting information across to people means organizing the information in readable and impressive format.

While this sounds very simple, it is in fact a complicated process involving at least three aspects, each one with its own bottleneck:

1. Creation of content;
2. Formatting of content;
3. Selection of tools for formatting and delivery.

Content usually comes from qualified people, such as teachers (in e-learning), accountants (in e-commerce), or officials (in e-governance). The bottleneck in content creation is convincing these people to use the digital form of content. They may not have the PC/software, may be unprepared to use these facilities, or may lack the motivation to go digital. Motivation is a big impediment as learning the new tools of content creation, plus the inputting of content, require both time and effort.

Formatting is the next step after content creation. Often, content is already formatted when input to the PC. The kind of format depends on which software is widely available, nowadays being the Microsoft Office suite. But more and more people are using presentation-ready software, such as the PDF* format, which can be read anywhere by the free PDF reader. This format - that can be read across different operating systems - is called cross-platform format. The HTML format is of course cross-platform, but its use may not be appreciated by people who just want to type, point and click, and keep the file-presentation ratio one-one.

Choosing the tools for formatting and delivery is the last question, but each tool has requirements that impact the other two issues to a large extent. Consider HTML that requires the use of multiple files (i.e., even for only one presentation, one text file and one or more image files will be required). This may be the most compact presentation, but its use of multiple files becomes a storage problem. Moreover, when saved in one platform and read in another, the file names themselves may change, and the presentation will be corrupt.

Therefore, the use of HTML is successful only when a single storage location is used, such as a server. For presentations that involve moving files, single-file formats become the winning choice. And, as mentioned already, the PDF format is favored because of its free reader.

You only have to search about presentations made in international conferences to check that many speakers use PDF for presentation. And if the presentation is available as PDF, then the speaker's paper must be available as PDF, too!

Surprisingly, Puppy (version 1.01) has a publishing tool, Scribus, that saves to PDF files. Yes, it is part of the Puppy suite of software that already boasts of Abiword, Mozilla HTML Composer, and many other text and graphics editing programs.

The PDF button  in the Scribus screen shown below saves the file in PDF. Note that Scribus is layout-oriented, with capability for rotating objects on the page - this is the rotation tool. Moreover, its text-editing window is separate - the story editor - that has its own sophisticated formatting capability.

For more information about Scribus, view this about scribus image, or check out this recent article about Scribus by a small business owner. (Richard Stallman  was mentioned in this article; his pages may be reached here.)

Finally, let me mention the ultimate solution to the platform compatibility problem, which is: bring your own platform - bring Puppy in mini-CD or USB flash drive!