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"

Comments

Office 12 Screenshots

[d2_m_viant]

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

Re:PDF Printer Driver

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:PDF Printer Driver

[eMartin]

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/

Try Foxit PDF Reader

[manastungare]

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.

Re:Doesn't this somehow infringe?

[krunk4ever]

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.

Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma

[Overly Critical Guy]

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.