Howard Miller

It's really not unoconv... another big circle

"But I do think you and Howard think way to lightly about the information war that is going on, the race for the best AI."

I think you misrepresent me. If you are going to pass your data to an external organisation for any kind of processing then it's absolutely right that you evaluate and consider the situation. It's never black and white. In this case, you are paying in kind for a service. It's up to you how you weigh that up. I honestly don't have much of an opinion one way or another - I'm not especially interested.

 

But... if you don't give in to one of these organisations you are REALLY going to struggle to find a reliable document converter. 

"Note to Howard: This PDF conversion is not about converting office documents to PDF, it is about "overlaying" images on PDF. The images being what the teacher scratches on a PDF as comments and feedback to the students."

Correct me if I'm wrong. I know it's hard to believe - but it happens

Two stage process...

1. Some random document is converted to PDF by Google, Amazon, unconv or whatever
2. The PDF is converted to PNG by Ghostscript (or the other thing).

The PNG image can now be used for annotation. That's my understanding.

The point is that if the document is already PDF (because that's how it was uploaded), you don't need the first step. So you can forget this whole sorry story if you instruct your students to only upload PDFs. Ghostscript is always just a local binary. Which if you are opposed to using the services of shady mega-corporations is not an unreasonable option.

I have no idea, I don't work for Google. But what if they do... Whether that is a bad thing or not is getting into the realms of "politics" and not for these forums.

It's entirely up to you if you want to use these services or you don't. But if you don't, it limits your choices considerably. It just does. That's all I'm saying.

As your hosting provider (not us) provides the Moodle installation service, you are going to have to speak to your host's support. On the face of it, something has gone wrong with the script that they provide.

You won't know this but we get posts like yours (in some form) at least daily. These "unofficial" installation scripts cause endless problems. You are better installing Moodle using the installation instructions here at moodle.org - Installing_Moodle. That means that we can help you.