Pete, I think you’re right. There’s the I/T guy side of me that in the interest of fairness wants to accurately present my side of the story, but all they want to hear is the magic words that will let them say your configuration is not supported. So they’re not playing fair either.

Of course, there’s not a lot of happiness down that road either, since they’re options for helping you with something like PDF viewing are probably limited. It’s just too small of a problem to get the time of someone who could actually help you or maybe even influence how the PDFs are created.

On the other hand, maybe by making a stink about it, if they hear it from enough people, they’ll actually start taking non-Windows, non-Mac systems into consideration in their design decisions. Ha! Right.

This is generally why I emphasize the need to use open standards when I write to these companies. Of course that falls on deaf or powerless ears also.

One time, my ISP screwed up. I get QWest, which feels about Linux the way Archie Bunker did about minorities. Anyway, their service failed in a way I was unable to fix from home, so I BS’ed tech support on the phone while they reset stuff and then told me “now go to the start menu and click the blue ‘e’ icon…”. This kept up right until I got the web back and tested it with a visit to Google. The support guy made a surprised noise as he saw the user-ID string pop up, and I said, “Sure enough, you’ve been talking to MANDRIVA 10.1 with FIREFOX the whole time!” Fortunately, this guy had a sense of humor about it.

I don’t mind the companies that say they don’t support it - fine, I’ll handle the problems on my end. What bugs me are the companies who literally say “We refuse to do business with you unless you run Windows, whether you can make it work on Linux or not.”