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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"
While I'm generally system-agnostic (It'll get me modded to oblivion, but IMO the best system is the one which does what you want it to do), there is one minor historical fact here.
Microsoft are not an innovative company, technology-wise. Innovation, invention, call it what you will, implies either creating something totally new or at the very least putting an original spin on something which already exists.
Where Microsoft do excel is in marketing. They have historically been masters at looking at the market and making their decisions based on where the market is going - generally by buying out or essentially copying the competition. cf. Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape vs. IE (granted, Netscape 4 was more than a little bloated and crufty, but I don't think the outcome would have been much different if it was sleek and efficient).
Don't get me wrong, they do have a few good products in their portfolio (I don't care whether or not YOU find shared calendars in Exchange useful, the business world does). But practically nothing that's particularly innovative.
There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
Metro? Thy production team be disbanded...
More likely PDF support will be built through Metro, as basically Metro is the XPS system in a Document.
As for the post above... Silly...
PDF will be rendered using Metro technologies is my guess, as they are not coding to the GDI but XPS. XPS is the new Windows/Document/Printer XAML format that the OS uses for virtually EVERYTHING.
Even CALLS between applications in exchanging data will pass XAML XPS information, let allow this is how the OS passes info to the Screen to Draw and the Pinter to Print.
GDI conversion layers are included for both way compatibility for Screen and Printer. i.e. your app uses XAML(WPF/XPS) to display something, but your driver only knows GDI, it will convert it.
Does everything Microsoft does have to be sinister?
How about this for a 'senerio'... For better performance and to take advantage of some of the new drawing capabilities in the WPF, chances are Adobe will even make a PDF reader for Windows that uses XAML/XPS/WPF to render the PDF information to the screen and the printer.
So does that make Adobe evil too?
These are such borderline (as a lot of people get them confused) concepts, but yet different. 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 - because the communication system for Graphic and any form of Media content throughout Windows is built in a simple and efficient XML format.
I though Slashdot like using concepts like XML?
Well, Microsoft did extend their JVM with some extra ties into windows and classes that specifically made it easier to write Windows applications that were run under Java (but not write once, run anywhere). However, this was back at Java version 1.0. Microsoft totally didn't bother upgrading their JVM to support features in Java 1.2, and above. Thus, most computers were shipped with a crippled, outdated version of Java.
The problem is, that most web java apps were based on this crippled version of Java. Since that's the case, if you're a web developer you're not going to force people to upgrade your version, so you just stay with what comes standard on Windows. In this way, Microsoft prevented Sun's Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows.
Duh. PDFs have been read/write since day 1. The format was aimed at the publishing industry, and if you look up "PDF workflow" you'll find a lot of tools for editing PDFs. That some clueless people who think "Acrobat READER" is the only thing that can open them imagine that makes them a locked, one-way format is laughable, but sadly common. That's why there are digital signing tools for PDFs. But just as easily you could encrypt and sign any document format, from plain text on up.
It would just be funny, except when these idiots discover their assumed security doesn't exist, they panic and claim anyone who edits PDFs must be a hacker, and demand the format be changed to make it impossible. So I wonder if MS's PDF's will be "embraced and extended" with features to fuck up such use, making a whole new mess of incompatibility with standard PDFs, and nightmares for prepress people given a bunch of MS-PDFs to output.
It would be possible to make valid PDFs that included the Word doc file as a resource. Users would open such a file in Word and edit it, then save it as MS-PDF again. After a while users would get used to this, even setting Word as the default app for PDFs, and this would lead to people saying "There's something wrong with your PDF (from OpenOffice/WordPerfect/etc), I can't open it in Word...." following their time-worn Embrace/Extend/Extinguish strategy.