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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
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."
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."
Unlikely. PDF import is WAY harder than export. here's an explanation I prepared earlier..
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