The portfolio server went down sometime last week, and we realised on Thursday that it couldn't be resurrected. Luckily the disks (two RAID mirrored disks) were fine and so we could transplant them into another of our servers (Tim Brody's development server). Unfortunately he was away on holiday last week, but he had shared the root password with another EPrints developer, so everything worked out alright! Tim's going to have a bit of a shock tomorrow morning though.
The good news, is that our exams officer says that the School policy on third and fourth year project reports and dissertations is that they are to be considered public material (after examination, of course). Hence, I am advised, we don't need to get individual permission from students if we want to host anything on a school repository. So I have spent some time this weekend uploading the highest scoring reports, presentations and posters onto portfolio. We will inform the students, of course, but not having to manage permission makes things a lot easier!
Of course, it's not all plain sailing. Try as I might, I can't turn the A1 PowerPoint posters into PDFs on my Mac. Goodness only knows what the problem is, so I am resorting to exporting them to PNG images instead.
Have you tried opening them in NeoOffice (or OpenOffice over X11) and exporting to PDF from there? I've had remarkably good luck with that.
ReplyDeleteI was hoping to try it out with MS Office on XP, instead of trusting the Mac. If it doesn't work, I'll try out NO/OO. Thanks for the suggestion!
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