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Comment by bbqmaster999 | Hacker News Reader

Libreoffice subtly reformatting the documents sent to me by my divorce lawyer was not the most fun thing let me tell you.

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The last time I had a problem with LibreOffice reformatting an important Word document, the issue were the fonts. In my case, installing the "wine-*-fonts-system" (times new roman, tahoma, wingdings) packages was enough to make LibreOffice format that document correctly; another option would have been to copy the original fonts from a Windows install.

A long time ago I was using linux and created my resume in Libreoffice and sent it to various job postings as a Word doc. Never had any luck.

Then years later I learned that what looked perfect (my resume) in Libreoffice looked pretty terrible when opened with official MS Word. I always wondered if that impacted my application. A guy that couldn't bother to format his resume appropriately.

This is the case where I would have used PDF. Didn't employers accept that?

They use ATS. Think text.

I learned long ago to never send an editable format to anyone who's not going to edit it.

Every device can open PDFs and see it exactly as it should be.

Mostly. Assuming you having the same font installed or embedded- to be sure about this you want to go further and use PDF/A

It's still much easier to create a cross-platform PDF that works on any device, than writing a document in LibreOffice and expect it to be 100% interoperable with Word, and viceversa.

In fact, I haven't created a broken PDF on any operating system in 15 years. Font embedding in PDFs is a solved problem.

>I learned long ago to never send an editable format to anyone who's not going to edit it.

I'd go further and say not to send an editable format to someone (read: recruiters) who is going to edit it. Too many times, I've gone to an interview and the interviewer's copy of my resume has been modified (not just names/contact info, but skills and experience) by a recruiter.

Which is why I always bring hard copies of my resume to an interview.

Edit: Fixed grammatical errors.

Of course, clients never know the facts as well as the lawyers. And lawyers never make mistakes for clients to edit. Yesterday I saw a document which claimed that a security agent had made available a $20 million dollar facility. The term they wanted--and would have corrected, was "Lender." There are a few programs that let you edit pdf's: Flexipdf is one of them. Otherwise, you get a paper copy with edits, or worse, an email with references to lines, which you can't correct because then the pagination changes.

These days you need an ATS-compatible machine-readable cv because no human being is going to see it. Text works perfectly fine.

At my small firm, we rarely(never?) send the actual word document to clients/businesses/lawyers/courts.

The documents are always converted to PDF first.

I stopped sending word documents to our clients when one client silently changed a section of a document without telling me (he disabled tracking changes for that part of the document). The document was then rejected by the clerk because of that. As I was there I convinced the clerk to let me make manual amendments to the document with my good old pen and made it go through. I had to let the client know about the change to make sure he would accept it. I was surprised that he blamed me for the situation… Switched to pdf. Stopped the hypocrisy.

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