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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"
So we just need to go search for Open Document?
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...
I don't know about you, but I can't wait for Microsoft Office with Pretty Darn Fast technology!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
... 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
"Redmond, start your photocopiers"
The next pasture is always greener
For those who haven't seen them yet, Office 12 Screenshots: http://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1
WOW, PDF support in Office 12, amazing how innovative microsoft is... let me just print and save this amazing article through my Native PDF print driver here on my little ole' primitive Macintosh for later use...
MS is going to support another company's format (PDF) but they won't support OpenDoc - an OASIS format they indirectly helped create?
Sooner or later this sort of hypocrisy is going to catch up to them and their business practices. No doubt there are legal interpretations of this that will eventually have to be answered as well.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Isn't there such a thing hanging around as freeware already in Windows, btw?
Say what you will about Microsoft, this is one company that knows how to innovate. Innovation runs in its blood. Microsoft really innovates like nobody else. Built-in PDF support is an excellent idea. No one ever thought about doing it but Microsoft did. Sometimes we are ready for their innovation as is the case with the PDF support. And sometimes Microsoft is ahead of the times as in the case of Microsoft Bob. This is one innovative company though.
The real question though is what they mean by native PDF support. Will I be able to fire up Word, open a PDF document, edit it and save as a Word document that someone else using earlier versions of Word can open? I bet a significant portion of the searches they see for PDF support involve something on that level, rather than simply being able to print to PDF - if I've been able to do that on a Mac for this long (long before OSX had it natively) I'm sure there are many similar options for Windows users.
...has had this for a long time.
But, let me be one of the first to say - "Its about freakin' TIME!"
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
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!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This most likely IS their competing format. I suspect Microsoft is just bundling their Office Killer with their Acrobat Killer into a nice, neat package. It's more efficient from a business stand point and gives each of the "Killers" more of an effect. Why buy a seperate license for Adobe or create a program to teach workers how to use OpenOffice when Microsoft Office has familiarity AND a bundled PDF creator in one.
I wonder if Microsoft will suffer any sort of anti-competitive lawsuits over this measure, assuming it is successful and isn't Vaporware as a vast majority of their announcements for current projects are. Of course, with the acquisition of Flash, I'm sure Adobe will be able to stick it out and possibly create an even better PDF product. I hope my faith in the Free Market is well founded.
Great - now they're finally catching up with Open Office :)
Actually, I'm wondering. If they're really implementing PDF support in that many products, wouldn't it be easier to just do it one place - say in Vista? Windows Vista could have native PDF support, and in turn all the programs would have PDF support - not just the above mentioned.
So, how's about you, me, and a few thousands of our friends search for OpenDocument support?
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
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.
everyone on slashdot bashes microsoft non-stop and its very annoying.
take for example pdf support. it became a feature that maybe they didn't do first but realized there is a need for it and they added it. are they supposed to never add features they didn't originally think of? isn't the most important thing that they reconize it is something customers want and they give it to them?
also i'm sick and tired of hearing that there's no innovation from microsoft. i've used office 12 and it is very cool and has lots of very useful innovative features. the menu tabs make finding what you need much easier than digging through drop downs. theres also an instant preview when you mouse over different fonts, and it displays it right in the document. same thing if you're adding tables, an instant preview of the table appears as you are creating one. these are just a few quick examples i thought were great.
will they get credit for these types of innovations? not on slashdot.
-mr silver
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
Coincidence that this announcement comes a few days after Massachusetts goes for PDF as one of the approved formats to use in government? Methinks not...
The future is in beta
PDF is the most miserable format to have to read the way that most of us do most of our reading -- on a computer. I've got lousy (ie over-50) eyes, so I magnify everything with that zoom magnifier so that the text fills the screen horizontally. What happens when I scroll down? Because pdf is for paper, and paper has different right and left margins depending on whether you're on a right or left page, the next page won't have its print filling my screen, it's off to the left or right. Play with the horizontal scroll bar every page. Thanks, pdf. Then, because it thinks the printed page is everything, Ctrl-A doesn't select 'All' text, just all text on the current page. And don't get me started on documents presented newspaper style, where I've gotta keep scrolling up and down, left and right. And page down gives the next page of text (according to the hypothetical paper), not the next screen of text according to the actual viewing device. That's so close to useless, you'd think MS invented it. The objective in software is to achieve device independence. The PDF viewer manages to achieve device dependence on a device that isn't even in use (paper). Paper is going to be an exception. A printable e-book would be nice, but if I want a paper book, I don't need a computer. To make the computer subservient to the dead tree is upside-down design.
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?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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;
for awhile now. Which is great, open up presentation, make one, and save it as a PDF makes for great easy marketing PDF's. =)
So, Miros~1 Office 12 is now ``A new theme'' + ``PDF export''.
If it was OSS, they would call it something like Office 11.0.0.1 .
Give ACrobat Speedup a try http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.ph p to get it. Basically it turns off all the damn plugins that ACrobat loads by default. This does mean that some advanced stuff won't work but who cares? You never see PDFs with it anyhow.
It really does drop the loading time singificantly.
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.
You actually said "simple and efficient" and "XML" in the same sentence. I would have shot myself after doing that. The current trend of "Its XML so its better" is really annoying. Specifically, everything which is changed to and XML based protocol becomes bloated and takes a lot more bandwidth to transmit and more processing power to read and use. It makes sense in some areas, such as certain internet protocols, but its makes no sense whatsoever in high-bandwidth/high-speed applications such as drawing to the screen. So, as to your questions, Microsoft is evil and Apple's Quartz is tons better.
XmlHttpRequest is a genuine Microsoft innovation. It's been around since 1999, but nobody really knew about it until Google created Gmail and people started disassembling Gmail's code wondering "how did they make it so f'ing fast?" Every other browser out there now implements a variation of this particular Microsoft technology; even Apple credits Microsoft for this.
And this odd need to go "Ooo look, Apple was t3h first!!!!111"
Who. Cares.
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). How does that makes them special?
Also what's real intersting if you are all up on copying then what about the OS-X kernel? Rather than make their own, or buy one like BeOS, they decided to grab Mach and use that. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but there's no innovation there, it was copying, it was grabbing a product that already worked well and using it. For that matter so was PDF integration. Adobe is responasable for PDF, not Apple.
I fail to understand the reason behind these kind of posts that crop up on Slashdot all the time. Who cares if Apple did something before someone else? What relivance is it? As it happens Microsoft had a production 32-bit OS with full memory protection and preemption (NT 3.1) almost a decade before Apple did. But, really, who cares? That in no way diminshes OS-X or it's capabilities, and Microsoft wasn't the first by a longshot to have that.
So really, knock it off. Who cares who did what first? What's relivant is what's out NOW, and what's comming out in the near future. I don't care that Linux wasn't the first OS to have a nice GUI, I care that it NOW has a nice GUI that I can use. Trying to pretend something is better because it was first is silly.
If only there was some kind of extensible document format that let people have it be both printable and viewable on a monitor! We'd have to let the style sheets cascade, but then we could even support things like text-to-speech from the same document meant for printing and viewing! Hey, why stop there, why not make it a markup language so that we can add other neat features, like hyper links!
Wow, though, that's a lot of standards work. We might need a standards body to oversee it. Maybe someday, people will start to encode information in this format so that we can view it comfortable on our monitors without fucking around with stupid documents.
-=-
Sarcasm aside, it's totally not a technology issue -- it's a people issue. PDF has its place in forms you want printed off, because it currently has momentum. I have no idea why people resist using the alternate solutions which have added benefits beyond the PDF momentum.
Bug the people who put up PDFs for use. People using PDFs where they should be using XML is lot like people using Shockwave flash where they should be using XML.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
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."
You could make an even stronger argument if you understood OpenGL. It's for graphics only (OpenGL means Open Graphics Language). DirectX is an entire framework for game (or interactive media in general) development, from graphics (2D and 3D, though DirectDraw is dead) to input (DirectInput) to sound (DirectSound) to networking (DirectPlay) to streaming video (DirectShow). OpenAL (a sister project to OpenGL, conceived long after the creation of DirectX) does audio, but there's nothing else that covers the rest of what DirectX does. As such, even developers that use OpenGL, like id, will also use DirectX for other areas (back in the day, GlQuake used DirectInput for input while using OpenGL for rendering). You already mentioned SDL[1], which when coupled with OpenGL is the only really viable competitor to DirectX. What it lacks in functionality it makes up in being cross platform. Apple tried to position Quicktime to fill in the DirectX void on Mac, but that really went nowhere.
That was more true years ago in DirectX's infancy. Today, OpenGL and Direct3D (DirectX's 3D rendering component) are very similar, with Direct3D moving more towards OpenGL than vice versa. As for being targetted to engineering apps, it's true that OpenGL was historically more concerned with being "correct" than "fast", but the proliferation of 3D accelerators has made that a moot point. OpenGL is perfectly viable technology for building game engines (don't believe me? Go argue with theCarmack), and Direct3D has actually become a viable technology for building engineering apps. What sets DirectX apart is everything else.
[1] For those of you too young/drunk to remember back a few years to when Loki Software was trying to make a business out of porting Windows games to Linux, you may not know that SDL was designed and developed as a way to port DirectX applications to Linux (where there is no DirectX). As such, it's no coincidence that SDL looks a lot like DirectX (to the point of even calling itself Simple DirectMedia Layer), being a suite of technologies that provide what game developers need. They did the right thing by using OpenGL for 3D rendering (in Microsoft's defense, when DirectX was created GlQuake hadn't happened yet and everybody had their own 3D rendering APIs -- Glide, Redline, etc). Even though Loki eventually went under (who would guess that gamers would rather buy the game for Windows than wait 6 months for a Linux version at full price?), SDL lived on. Yay for open source!
Wow, that was the most breathless shilling I have seen in a long time. So MS took SVG and did an embrace and extend and it's AWESOME!. Yea right.
evil is as evil does
Adobe's spec allows you to embed a digital signature in a PDF.
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."
As other posts have pointed out, document signing is the only real way to proof documents. Your mention of a major engineering firm "securing" documents this way makes me feel kind of uneasy...
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
They are cutting win32 api to lead the customers to the next honey pit, .NET. They need to move the customers around, because otherwise the competition would catch up with an increase of win32 api complience (WINE, nt2unix, wind/u, MainWin, Willows Twin API) and wabi complience (WINE, Cedega). If Microsoft stays put, they will lose the win32-leg. This is whyt they will cut it away. They will be standing on two legs, and are trying to grow an additional leg (at customers expense) called .NET.
Adding good support for .pdf is like self-amputating the (quickly rotting) .doc leg. After this amputation, Microsoft will be standing for a while (before and if .NET is adopted ***) on one leg, binary compatibility. This is where they really excel. The windows software out there is so buggy, that it is a huge task to make an binary layer that matches the bugs in the early Windows, changes modes around to match the various Windows versions, etc. Typically, I can easily run about 5 % of old Windows code using WINE, whereas about 50 % runs on a modern version of Windows (I am talking about software that Microsoft has not tested within their labs, like computer games made in Finland for Finnish kids, but to some extend this ranges to other multimedia software and games, up to Tiger Woods Golf 2000, which does not run on latest Windows). However, if people would see Microsoft balancing with one leg, there would be much more money pushing it over by an improved binary compatibility.
In my opinion it is very dangerous for Microsoft to simultaneously cut two legs, win32 and .doc.
***) In the company where I work at, the initial enthusiasm for .NET is dying in the upper management. The initial projects implemented with .NET have been near catastrophes in engineering productivity and quality, whereas our C++ work has been okeyish. Also, the middle management is seeing the interoperability difficulties with C++/.NET -- C++ is still needed at the algorithm level to gain competitive speed, and the interoperability issues with .NET are huge.
-- Imperial units must die --
The majority, if not all, of the issues you describe are with the viewer, not the format. Moreover, many are solved by learning to use the viewer. Continuous view, with an appropriate page fit setting, will solve the majority of the problems you've described.
Personally, while I don't have poor vision, I do like large and highly readable text since I work on computers a *lot*, and I have a very high resolution display as well. I rarely find PDF to be a problem in this regard. I'm generally as happy with PDF as with HTML or any other format, and much happier with it than with some.
I work in newspaper publishing, and I can assure you that PDF is for *much* more than a paper replacement. It's quite simply the only sane format to use when you want to aggregate several smaller jobs into a larger one - such as when designing a page with client-supplied advertisments in it. PDF lets the recipient provide a basic specification (all fonts embedded, PDF 1.3, 10cm by 12cm, CMYK colour) and rely on that - without having to worry about different apps, incompatible versions, fonts, different platforms, or all sorts of other garbage.
It's also great for archiving anything where you need to preserve the appearance, not just the content. It's not a bad idea to archive the content as well, since extracting content from PDF can be painful (it's a page description language, not a traditional document format), but it's darn handy.
I have always said that pdf support is one area where Linux smokes Windows hands down. I have wanted someone (anyone) else to give me some alternitave to reader for Windows for a long time.
Take your ad-ware bundled bloated crap elsewhere Adobe! When MS says they have had high demand to support the format I believe them.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I don't use windows, but it sounds like this is saying there's no current way to print a PDF document in windows from every application without some third party add-on? Is that really true?
I'm in disbelief! for years now I've been asking people to "send me a PDF" of their word or whatever document assuming Windows had this like. Apparently that must be difficult to do on windows?
Amazing. Well we mac users can feel smug about something else now. Welcome to the modern age windows users. heh.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is very odd. I've seen almost no comments along the lines of "Yay, native PDF support in this software that lots of people use, now maybe they'll stop emailing me bloody word docs."
Rather, there's lots of ranting about innovation, and lots of people saying that $[software] did it first. Yep, sure. I have an unpleasant revelation for you - *none* of the software industry is exactly a powerhouse of innovation. They all implement ideas that came from each other, improve them or butcher them along the way, and try to compete. OO.o may have had PDF export first, but it's UI is a bad clone of an even worse UI (Office '97). Office might be picking up PDF export pretty late in the game, but on the other hand it looks like they're working to fix the train wreck that is office suite user interfaces. Similarly, Apple and Microsoft are busy chasing each other, nicking each other's ideas, and coming up with the odd good one along the way. Arguing about who is most innovative is just not interesting. Ideas come from all the involved parties, and everybody steals them. Big deal.
To me, this just looks like MS doing something sensible, often requested by customers, and perhaps long overdue. It's beyond me why all the comments here are so overwhelmingly negative.
Slashdot isn't usually this bad, folks. What's gotten into this bunch today?
For those talking about printer-driver based PDF export, it's not that simple. Here's what I posted earlier. Summary: OS based would be nice, but a simple generic print interface would be insufficiently flexible so something more would be needed anyway. Anyway, if they built PDF export into the OS, I bet this crowd would be screaming about monopolies, bundling, and anticompetitive business practices.
I find all this pretty disappointing. There are posts on the forum thread with the new user interface screenshots that are foaming crazy, and they all prominently say "I support open source!" or rant about OSS. Yet so many folks here wonder why nobody is interested in listening when someone has something constructive and rational to say. I begin to wonder if the crazies are the loud majority, rather than the loud minority...
Openoffice.org and WordPerfect Office have had pdf support for long enough. They are only catching up with competition. I don't think that is anti-competitive.
OpenGL not good for games? OpenGL is *fantastic* for games - all the games I play use OpenGL (things like RTCW:ET, True Combat: Elite (based on RTCW), Doom 3, Quake, the project I work on myself - Oolite for Linux).
It's quite possible you don't fully understand what OpenGL does since you mistook it for having audio support - OpenGL does not address audio at all (use OpenAL for that).
SDL + OpenGL seems to work pretty well, and SDL isn't for Linux - SDL is for Linux, BSD, OS X, Windows etc. SDL is platform agnostic. From my point of view, SDL is vastly superior to DirectX, because DirectX only allows me to target one platform. SDL allows me to target all platforms.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
the PDF file has to adhere to strict standards before you can call it PDF. Adobe owns the trademarks and I doubt they'd let Microsoft extend the format.
This is a response to the decision by Massachusetts, make no mistake. Microsoft have probably had some PDF support for some time but haven't released it. What this allows Microsoft to do is strong-arm Massachusetts into accepting Office based on PDF support, while at the same time all their employees will save in the default format which is of course the Office one.
However, that isn't going to work because Massachusetts have specifically stated that they want their documents in Open Document format or PDF by default - they don't want the option of saving to them while some Office suite goes off and does its own thing bypassing them.
Just to clarify: any OS X program that can print can produce PDF files.
:(
Just to clarify more: OS X does not produce PDF files with embedded fonts. This means that you cannot *guarantee* that the recipient sees the same thing that you printed. This happend to me while sending a advertisement layout to a local newspaper.
Very not good.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
It appears you are trying to access a function that is not installed. Install the sarcasm detector now? Please insert the Microsoft Office supplemental CD now.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Comment removed based on user account deletion
you're kidding right? microsoft's current pdf capabilities lack something to be desired. we stich together several pdf fragments to create a final document, and whenever a ms pdf is encountered, things don't go smoothly. pdf in and of itself needs to become an open standard, or at least something like it needs to. adobe may have the standard printable document format atm, but i'd love a more open solution to come about.