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Office 12 to Include Native PDF Support

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the pdf-and-the-tower-of-babel dept.

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"

11 of 473 comments (clear)

  1. Office 12 Screenshots by d2_m_viant · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those who haven't seen them yet, Office 12 Screenshots: http://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1

  2. Re:PDF Printer Driver by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Informative
    Two options that I know of:

    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.
  3. Re:PDF Printer Driver by eMartin · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are a few.

    http://www.primopdf.com/

    http://www.pdf995.com/

    http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm

    http://www.paehl.com/pdf/

  4. Re:How "native"? Importing too? by commodoresloat · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Try Foxit PDF Reader by manastungare · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Doesn't this somehow infringe? by krunk4ever · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_For mat

    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
  7. Re:How "native"? Importing too? by ColaMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  8. Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma by Overly+Critical+Guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."
  9. P.S. Avalon versus Quartz by Overly+Critical+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

    For anyone interested in reading about Avalon versus Quartz and developer reaction to it, here are a few thought-provoking links:

    http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/t pc/f/48409524/m/182000835731
    http://blogs.msdn.com/dancre/archive/2004/03/25/96 131.aspx
    http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/04/14/avalo nxaml_f/

    --
    "Sufferin' succotash."
  10. Re:How "native"? Importing too? by Craig+Ringer · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  11. Re:Open Document? by TheSpoom · · Score: 4, Informative

    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