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Office 12 to Include Native PDF Support
parry writes "Microsoft announced today at the MVP summit that Office 12, the next version of Microsoft Office, will have native support for the PDF document format. Support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath." From the article: "Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision"
For those who haven't seen them yet, Office 12 Screenshots: http://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1
What are you on about? Adobe reader 7 is the fastest yet, and to print the PDF, just right click and choose "print" just like any other recognised format.
...has had this for a long time.
But, let me be one of the first to say - "Its about freakin' TIME!"
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
PDF995, which is ad-supported (or was last I used it).
PDFCreator, which is free and open-source.
I know there are others, those are just the two I've used - successfully, I might add.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are a few.
m
http://www.primopdf.com/
http://www.pdf995.com/
http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.ht
http://www.paehl.com/pdf/
So? The point the poster above was making is that PDF is not the answer to document security. Especially if you're not using the password protection built into PDF, but even with it, the information can be manipulated by someone who wants to. The GP poster didn't make any sense - why would putting docs in PDF guarantee they hadn't been changed? Someone could easily create an entirely different PDF if they didn't want to buy (or steal) acrobat to toy with the original one.
Foxit reminds me of OS X's Preview every time I use it. Fast, lean, and loads quickly. It may not read some of the more advanced stuff that PDFs may contain, but it's great for previewing/printing. Free as in beer. No install required, so I even carry a copy on my thumbdrive.
I always thought the PDF format was a free format (hence Apple has preview) and there's also tons of other PDF editors and printers besides Adobe. The format that is licensed to Adobe is the PS (post-script). That's why printers that support PS are so expensive because each printer with PS support sold needs to pay royalty to Adobe.
r mat
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Fo
These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, colour, and images. PDF is an open standard, and anyone may write applications that can read or write PDFs royalty-free.
HD Trailers
> Making PDFs Read/Write would torpedo a LOT of current practices.
- ex.html
We do the same thing in our workplace too.
Someone already mentioned writing to PDFs in Acrobat professional. IIRC, this is limited to minor changes - correcting words, inserting new pages, etc).
However, there is software to create Word documents _from_ PDFs. Once someone has a word file, he can edit it as much as he likes, and reexport it as PDF.
Some links from Google are below (search term: "create PDF from Word" -- look at the
'Sponsored Links'):
http://www.solidpdf.com/pdf/_to_word_converter/42
http://www.verypdf.com/pdf2word/index.html
http://www.eprintdriver.com/PDFoptions/PDF-Writer
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ is the site that I know for it but at any rate. One of the undergrads asked for it in the labs so I checked it out. Seems to work very well, it correctly rendered everything thrown at it from sinple Word documents, to complex Excel sheets, to Matlab output to other PDFs. Thus far, I've seen no crashes and no goof ups. It doesn't have all the features that Acrobat does but it doesn't much matter for most things. It installs a printer driver that works well and creates usable PDFs.
If you were reading one of our PDFs, you could be assured that the content was accurate.
I hope you don't stake the whole company on that. I do a simple pdftops (or, print to a postscript printer) , edit the postscript file in any number of editors, then pstopdf again. This is all with standard ghostscript tools.
In fact I've often done it to people's protected PDF tender documents, just to get large portions of text to include in our reply/quote.
Without document signing (and people checking for that *every single time* they open the document) you're screwed.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Ok, great, so Apple got PDF viewing back with OS 10 (please note it's viewing that's built in, MS is talking about PDF creation as well).
What the grandparent meant was that OS X got PDF creation back with 10.0. Any program that can print under OS X can produce PDF files.
You might find it interesting to read about DisplayPostScript since that is a big part of what lead to OS X's PDF capabilities.
Even DirectX wasn't started by Microsoft. It began as Reality Lab by RenderMorphics who were bought by Microsoft, who then turned it into DirectX.
Metro is an extention of how elegant the new 3D Vector system built in Windows is - and also how different it is from anything Apple or anyone else has even attempted to do. Bascially when new applications for Windows are rendering cool graphics on the screen or printer, they are using XML in the from of XAML - which looks a lot like SVG, but has a 'chunk' of different abilities and purposes than SVG does. So Metro is basically just saying, ok instead of drawing this to the screen, save it in a Document, a Metro Document
So after you get done hyperventilating over this super-exciting "new" Microsoft innovation, why don't you read up on OS X and what it has done with PDF for the past five years? Quartz, also vector-based, is built on the PDF object graph, which is itself a subset of Postscript, and has allowed applications to save their contents to a PDF for years. It's one of the reasons OS X is so great with desktop publishing--what you see really is exactly what you'll get, down to the typography spacing, because the same graphics operations drawing the screen are also what get sent to the printer and what get saved to PDF.
"Sufferin' succotash."
You could make an even stronger argument if you understood OpenGL. It's for graphics only (OpenGL means Open Graphics Language). DirectX is an entire framework for game (or interactive media in general) development, from graphics (2D and 3D, though DirectDraw is dead) to input (DirectInput) to sound (DirectSound) to networking (DirectPlay) to streaming video (DirectShow). OpenAL (a sister project to OpenGL, conceived long after the creation of DirectX) does audio, but there's nothing else that covers the rest of what DirectX does. As such, even developers that use OpenGL, like id, will also use DirectX for other areas (back in the day, GlQuake used DirectInput for input while using OpenGL for rendering). You already mentioned SDL[1], which when coupled with OpenGL is the only really viable competitor to DirectX. What it lacks in functionality it makes up in being cross platform. Apple tried to position Quicktime to fill in the DirectX void on Mac, but that really went nowhere.
That was more true years ago in DirectX's infancy. Today, OpenGL and Direct3D (DirectX's 3D rendering component) are very similar, with Direct3D moving more towards OpenGL than vice versa. As for being targetted to engineering apps, it's true that OpenGL was historically more concerned with being "correct" than "fast", but the proliferation of 3D accelerators has made that a moot point. OpenGL is perfectly viable technology for building game engines (don't believe me? Go argue with theCarmack), and Direct3D has actually become a viable technology for building engineering apps. What sets DirectX apart is everything else.
[1] For those of you too young/drunk to remember back a few years to when Loki Software was trying to make a business out of porting Windows games to Linux, you may not know that SDL was designed and developed as a way to port DirectX applications to Linux (where there is no DirectX). As such, it's no coincidence that SDL looks a lot like DirectX (to the point of even calling itself Simple DirectMedia Layer), being a suite of technologies that provide what game developers need. They did the right thing by using OpenGL for 3D rendering (in Microsoft's defense, when DirectX was created GlQuake hadn't happened yet and everybody had their own 3D rendering APIs -- Glide, Redline, etc). Even though Loki eventually went under (who would guess that gamers would rather buy the game for Windows than wait 6 months for a Linux version at full price?), SDL lived on. Yay for open source!
For anyone interested in reading about Avalon versus Quartz and developer reaction to it, here are a few thought-provoking links:
t pc/f/48409524/m/1820008357316 131.aspxo nxaml_f/
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/
http://blogs.msdn.com/dancre/archive/2004/03/25/9
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/04/14/aval
"Sufferin' succotash."
If that is the case, then so is Printing a relic of the age of Paper.
n ters.php3 ],
I think your post misses the point completely.
Although you can read pdf's online, a PDF is made to port your propietary format document to a file that can be printed on all printers driven by device drivers on all OS's that can host applications that know how to read PDF's and talk to the printer driver(s). And there are many.
The PDF specs are open, en well documented, and anyone can implement a PDF reader/writer to be compatible with his technical environment. Thanks to Gimp print and GhostScript
[ http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Pri
I can hook up age-old printers to an operating system that "does not support" them.
So if you want to select all text, you can. There are free (as in beer and speech ) PDF converters all over the globe. Go and pick one.
And finally, PDF is not bound to pages either. You can have slideshows in PDF, photo's in PDF. There is a PDF for the display device (screen) too. Look at Mac OS X, since the beginning, *six* years ago, everything could be saved or printed to pdf, right under your nose with Cmd-P. PDF is part of the operating system in Mac OS X. Unless you want the advanced features, you have more portability than you need. Adobe has nice extra features for PDF if you need them. Go check it out.
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* Sigh *
The majority, if not all, of the issues you describe are with the viewer, not the format. Moreover, many are solved by learning to use the viewer. Continuous view, with an appropriate page fit setting, will solve the majority of the problems you've described.
Personally, while I don't have poor vision, I do like large and highly readable text since I work on computers a *lot*, and I have a very high resolution display as well. I rarely find PDF to be a problem in this regard. I'm generally as happy with PDF as with HTML or any other format, and much happier with it than with some.
I work in newspaper publishing, and I can assure you that PDF is for *much* more than a paper replacement. It's quite simply the only sane format to use when you want to aggregate several smaller jobs into a larger one - such as when designing a page with client-supplied advertisments in it. PDF lets the recipient provide a basic specification (all fonts embedded, PDF 1.3, 10cm by 12cm, CMYK colour) and rely on that - without having to worry about different apps, incompatible versions, fonts, different platforms, or all sorts of other garbage.
It's also great for archiving anything where you need to preserve the appearance, not just the content. It's not a bad idea to archive the content as well, since extracting content from PDF can be painful (it's a page description language, not a traditional document format), but it's darn handy.
Unlikely. PDF import is WAY harder than export. here's an explanation I prepared earlier..
OpenGL not good for games? OpenGL is *fantastic* for games - all the games I play use OpenGL (things like RTCW:ET, True Combat: Elite (based on RTCW), Doom 3, Quake, the project I work on myself - Oolite for Linux).
It's quite possible you don't fully understand what OpenGL does since you mistook it for having audio support - OpenGL does not address audio at all (use OpenAL for that).
SDL + OpenGL seems to work pretty well, and SDL isn't for Linux - SDL is for Linux, BSD, OS X, Windows etc. SDL is platform agnostic. From my point of view, SDL is vastly superior to DirectX, because DirectX only allows me to target one platform. SDL allows me to target all platforms.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Just to clarify: any OS X program that can print can produce PDF files.
:(
Just to clarify more: OS X does not produce PDF files with embedded fonts. This means that you cannot *guarantee* that the recipient sees the same thing that you printed. This happend to me while sending a advertisement layout to a local newspaper.
Very not good.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
Gee, why would MS need to admit so many people want a feature that they don't provide? Could it be that so many people are familiar with (at least hearing about) PDF support built-in to OpenOffice.org and Mac OS X?
Before OpenOffice.org came out with the PDF and Flash support built-in, the biggest draw to the business users I knew was OpenOffice.org's price and compatibility with MS Office. But, once PDF and Flash were built-in a number of business people I knew were willing to switch (or, parallel use) for this feature. A number asked if this was available in MS Office. When I told them about the license fee and kludgey interface for Acrobat they were very disappointed.
Those unaware of Mac OS X are surprised to find PDF creation built-in to everything printable. And with Tiger's ability to compress and encrypt PDF's there is less reason to consider Acrobat (unless specific features are needed).
Good for Microsoft to finally see the light and put the screws to Adobe by supporting PDF directly and natively.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Here's a link to search for "open document format" on Office Online.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Acrobat Professional costs about $500/license. Like the old Winzip add-on, its function of exporting PDF's (which it atually does by creating a PDF-printer setup) is so relatively modest that it should be included in the OS tools without having to buy an add-on package.
And besides, the PDFCreator tool at sourceforge.net works considerably better than Adobe Acrobat. The resulting PDF is smaller, prints more successfully, is easier to edit, and is not likely to crash your computer when you use it to print PDF's from Word documents written on a computer running Japanese Windows and Japanese office, even if the document is entirely English (unlike the Adobe Distiller tool that actually creates PDF's from Adobe Acrobat).
So Adobe Acrobat is not Microsoft's competition in this field. PDFCreator, and the other Ghostscript based PDF tools, are *Adobe's* competitor. Adobe is scared to death of these tools, and would happily collaborate with Microsoft to get *some* revenue from licensing the PDF printer utilities as part of MS Windows or Office, rather than have people throw out their utilities wholesale and jump straight to those freeware and open source tools. And Microsoft is happy to partner with them this way, since they get a built-in functionality that a lot of people want rather than going to *gasp* sourceforge.net
I know exactly why nobody uses XML and everyone uses PDF.
XML has absolutely NO software support. I can painstakingly write this great XML file by hand, using either a long, complex Tutorial which I can hopefully bend to my needs, or by reading the several pages of specification packed with technical garbage. Fine. Now what the fuck do I view it in? What do my recipients view it in?
On the other hand, to create a PDF, I can create the content with my application of choice and print to a PDF distiller (of which there's a bunch of free ones, mostly relying on GhostScript). A PDF viewer is already installed on almost every user's machine, and are available in any size (from minimal to bloated) for any platform.
When XML becomes just as easy to use (create document, export / print, e-mail) then it has a small, tiny chance to become relevant in the document space.
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