Making Emacs Act More Like a Text Editor

Emacs used to be a great programmer's editor. It still is, but non-text features keep creeping in making it less usable for editing and viewing text. For example, doc-view mode makes emacs render a PDF, DVI, or PS file. But PDF and PS are text formats, so I can't imagine why I'd want emacs to render them--other tools do that well.
To make emacs better-behaved, it seems the following in one's .emacs file is sufficient:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.pdf\\'" . fundamental-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.ps\\'" . fundamental-mode))

Thanks to Stefan Monnier at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/gnu.emacs.help/TGVh05FGzK8
My .emacs file (really, my emacs-custom.el which is loaded from my .emacs) has been growing since Fall 1988, and I don't see that changing, especially as new puppies start monkeying with emacs' behavior. Of course, I do trim detritus from time-to-time.
Actually there might be some stuff in there from my time at William and Mary, 1984-1986. Zippy says "yow."

Generating Portable PDF

Yes, that's right, the subject, expanded, says "generating portable portable document format."  I got a shock this week when a PDF I had generated on a Linux system using LibreOffice 3.3.4 would not display on either of two XP systems I tried to show it on. The first time was in class, when I thought I was going to display an example. The issue is that LibreOffice used a font that the Windows systems didn't have. I googled it and installed a font with almost the same name, but it made no difference. It turns out one can force PDF to live up to its name in LibreOffice by specifying PDF/A-1a in the PDF options. Thanks to someone at a blog I can't find right now [ Jean at http://www.taming-openoffice-org.com/newsite/?page_id=77 ] for pointing out to me that the settings are persistent, so when chosen once it is unnecessary to deal with it later.

The persistence seems like an inconsistency in LibreOffice: how are we to know there isn't a configuration option buried in the myriad of randomly-organized menus? How are to know the setting is persistent? It seems most are not.

To date I have encountered no portability problems with PDFs generated from LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf.

Printing to PDF, Firefox, Ubuntu

Off and on I've been irritated that Firefox print-to-file functionality defaults to postscript with the filename before the .ps extension blank. What's up with that? This is more of an issue now that I have a Kindle, and thus print to PDF much more often than to paper, so tonight I poked through about:config, shrugged, and turned to Google. I found one useful page, http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7890849&postcount=7, but prefer "my" way to his, simply because my filter places exactly the right configuration lines on the screen, leaving nothing to manual hunting.

1) Enter about:config.
2) Type print_to_filename in the filter bar.
3) Place exactly the same path, file name, and extension in each setting.

This is what mine now looks like:

Needless (I hope) to say, different folks will have different printers, and so my entry for an HL-2040 will be atypical and most other people will have printers not shown here.

There is no generally-useful file name, so indicating the application that generated the PDF seems a reasonable choice. IMHO, /tmp is the only reasonable directory to use so that the user's home directory isn't littered. Littering $HOME is an unfortunate tendency of Linux developers.