Need suggestions.

[Chris Wagner]

I am considering moving to Yellow Dog Linux on my primary work 
machine. The machine should more than handle YDL, but I have many 
files that are currently in many formats that I don't particularly 
have converted and am not sure that I want to convert them.

I am looking for suggestions from any on the list here that have run 
Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark, and MS Office.

I know that from what I've seen, OpenOffice.org translates MS Office 
files nicely for the most part. I ran into a small issue yesterday 
taking a PowerPoint presentation into OOO's presentation program 
where the Excel graphs I had created had messed up color schemes on 
the data value labels, but otherwise, translated quite nicely (v. 
1.03 on win98).

I guess I'm a little concerned, because ideally I want to work in 
Linux for most of the work I do, but I need to know that I can do it 
effectively.

I know that from what I've read and experienced myself with GIMP 
(which I really like - not as slick as PS to me, but it's a NICE app) 
and KIllustrator, which would take in the two primary programs that I 
use for DTP here at the office.

The BIGGEST consideration is can I take YDL and use the apps that 
install with KDE and Gnome and make it work with a MS Office setup - 
in other words, since all the rest of the users are using MS Office 
for the most part, as are most of the people I deal with in sending 
stuff to, can I take that work and save it in a translation that they 
can handle. Obviously anything outside PDF or any other means that 
creates outlines of text will be subject to font matching, which 
tends to be an issue at times. We work around it by PDF.

And from what I've heard, PDF seems to be pretty available on the 
Linux platform, but I need confirmation that I can get it and that 
it's not going to cost us.

I can't entertain any more expenses here this year on IT, so this is 
a freebie kind of need. :-)

Hope that was clearer than mud.

Thanks for any help, all.

Take care.

Chris