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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"
Does this mean it will have PDF-import capabilities too? Or is this just export-only? It says on the article that it can publish to PDF. Just curious...
... they could incorporate a minimalist, fast pdf viewer into Windows itself, I would happy. Ever since zip support was incorporated into XP, I've been so pleased that I've had no reason to download winzip. And the Windows "Picture and Fax" image viewer is exactly what I had wanted for a while- a fast, simple way to view images, zoom in, etc. That's what I would want for .pdf's in Windows, a simple way to quickly open, view, and print. And with Adobe's latest offerings getting bigger, more bloated, and more irritating with each new release, believe me, it can't come fast enough.
Thank God for www.oldversion.com.
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Isn't there such a thing hanging around as freeware already in Windows, btw?
Is it not amazing that MS is supporting PDF? AFTER MA made its decision with use on Open Document formats? I mean if this is such a great feature, then why was it not discussed at the PDC? Oh yeah, forgot at that time the MA decision was not final. So I wish MS would admit that they are doing this so that they can be MA decision compliant (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,390203 96,39215912,00.htm) and not because "the customer" wanted it. BECAUSE the customer has wanted it for ages!
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Ha, you don't understand Microsoft very well. My guess is that the PDF support will be severly crippled. In which case, they will make the PDF format over time look less desirable than their own competing format. I mean, didn't they do the same thing with Java, releasing their own crippled JVM included in every copy of windows? Microsoft eventually replaced it with .NET.
What better way to defeat the competition than by releasing a crippled version of their format that's automatically bundeled with your system, and then coming out with a better "solution".
Just a theory.
native support for the PDF document format
In other words,
native support for the Portable Document Format document format
live(free) || die;
That's because PDF is a WYSIWYP (the "P" standing for "print"). Yes, it's a pain, but PDF is hardly alone in this regard. Most word processing formats have the same drawback. I don't know if these fixed-width formats are because of the "Age of Paper" as you say, or whether it's because so many people can't stand the user/reader being in control of the formatting. IMHO, HTML and other markup languages are better (as well as simpler) for information content than rigid page formats.
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I've never really understood why modern printers don't use PDF instead of PostScript. PostScript is a Turing-complete language, so there is no guarantee that if you start rendering a PS page to a bitmap it will ever terminate (and even if it will, it could take a long time on the 50MHz MIPS processor on your printer). PDF lacks loop constructs, so the rendering time of a PDF page is bounded by the size of the PDF representation of the page. This would make it a lot more logical for use as a printer language.
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The Java JRE has to adhere to strict standards before you can call it Java. Sun owns the trademarks and I doubt they'd let Microsoft extend the format.