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Office 12 to Include Native PDF Support 473
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"
Open Document? (Score:5, Funny)
So... Let me get this straight... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:So... Let me get this straight... (Score:2)
What makes you think that? Sounds like wishful thinking to me.
Re:So... Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah for sure! Remember in the late 1990s there was a company doing things like this, and the Justice Department went after them. We got a full ruling on the facts from a federal judge detailing count after count of monopolistic practices. The Justice Department really put that company in its place for breaking the law. What was that company called again? Oh, wait a minute...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open Document? (Score:2)
Seriously, it'd be interesting if you could get a lot of people to do that and see which ones they actually pay attention to. I seriously doubt they'd consider adding support for any of the above, but, then again, I'm rather surprised they added ANY kind of support for anything that isn't pure MS.
Re:Open Document? (Score:5, Informative)
How "native"? Importing too? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you were reading one of our PDFs, you could be assured that the content was accurate. Even printed versions of the document were (supposed to be) considered suspect.
Making PDFs Read/Write would torpedo a LOT of current practices.
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:2)
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:5, Informative)
Could create a new PDF but not with your signature (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm also sure you can edit the text in a normal text editor.
This is not security!!!!!
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:4, Informative)
We do the same thing in our workplace too.
Someone already mentioned writing to PDFs in Acrobat professional. IIRC, this is limited to minor changes - correcting words, inserting new pages, etc).
However, there is software to create Word documents _from_ PDFs. Once someone has a word file, he can edit it as much as he likes, and reexport it as PDF.
Some links from Google are below (search term: "create PDF from Word" -- look at the
'Sponsored Links'):
http://www.solidpdf.com/pdf/_to_word_converter/42 [solidpdf.com]
http://www.verypdf.com/pdf2word/index.html [verypdf.com]
http://www.eprintdriver.com/PDFoptions/PDF-Writer
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
PDF read/write...it's been here a while (Score:3, Insightful)
Well then it's time to kiss the current practices goodbye! PDFs have been read/write for a number of years with apps like Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. With formatting completely preserved, too.
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...
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:3, Interesting)
Only because certain applications refuse to change certain documents. In practice, anything not signed with hard crypto can be changed with simple low level tools.
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
uh-oh... (Score:2)
If that is what they're doing,
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How "native"? Importing too? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"I don't think that means what you think it means" (Score:4, Funny)
Now if only... (Score:5, Interesting)
Try Foxit PDF Reader (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Try Foxit PDF Reader (Score:3, Interesting)
Pdf files can do a lot of things. You can create interactive documents, with animations, scripted with javascript, you can embed movies into documents. Few examples, just from the top of my head:
a calculator [tug.org]
Lorenz Attractor [uni-bremen.de]
I have seen much mor
Re:Now if only... (Score:2)
Re:Now if only... (Score:2)
It'll never be picked up by Microsoft (even though SWF is an open format), because MS is still trying to push it's Flash Killer line of graphics / motion tools. Real shame, because it's one of the better uses of Flash.
Re:Now if only... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know when they started publishing the format, it's been some time. Note that the keyword here is "open", used in the same way as fifteen years ago, when it only meant you could look inside the machine and were limited in what you could make with the information. It is very remote from open source or free software, or even standards.
You have to agree to a licence to get the Flash specification. You notably have to agree to use the information only to generate Flash
Not quite what you want but... (Score:3, Insightful)
It really does drop the loading time singificantly.
Re:Now if only... (Score:2)
4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standard (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X [wikipedia.org]
"Redmond, start your photocopiers"
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:2)
My father's always been pissed at Microsoft for including PDF support in their Mac products but not in their PC products.
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:4, Informative)
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:2)
PDF has been a target printer in Gnome for a long time. I reckon longer than OS X has been around.
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:2)
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:2)
He clearly said as long as OS X has been around, not as long as it has been around in one form or another.
By your logic, Windows XP has been around since 1995, when Windows 95 was released, since they share the Explorer shell. Oh, wait, Windows NT 3.1 used an earlier version of the XP kernel, so Windows XP has been around even longer.
In-case you misunderstood what I am getting at, he means since OS X was released as a product that came in a box that said OS X on it. It being o
Ok, so seriously, what is it with Mac users? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Ok, so seriously, what is it with Mac users? (Score:4, Informative)
What the grandparent meant was that OS X got PDF creation back with 10.0. Any program that can print under OS X can produce PDF files.
You might find it interesting to read about DisplayPostScript [wikipedia.org] since that is a big part of what lead to OS X's PDF capabilities.
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:2)
Office 12 might be going to include PDF support but I really wonder why they don't just make the Windows print system capable of producing PDF files.
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standa (Score:2)
Office 12 Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
ughhhh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 sup
Re:Office 12 Screenshots (Score:4, Insightful)
About OpenDocument format, we ought to start a pool on how many versions it will be before they "listen to their customers" for that request.
(And why don't some Open developers whip up a plugin for Office to allow OpenDocument support for Office?)
BUT WHAT I FIND MOST INTERESTING, IS Office 12's ENTIRELY NEW and RE-ARRANGED INTERFACE!!
Its NOT JUST AN UPGRADE!
Its a WHOLE NEW USER EXPERIENCE, which means...
There is no way a corporation can "drop" Office 12 into place without people first being trained! (Well they could, and probably will, but to their non-techie users it'll be a shock!)
Thank-you Microsoft! For once again giving us innovation to do the same work an entirely different way!
(But now we have another good reason to look at alternate brands for that "entirely different way"!)
Native PDF Support (Score:5, Funny)
PDF Printer Driver (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't there such a thing hanging around as freeware already in Windows, btw?
Re:PDF Printer Driver (Score:5, Informative)
PDF995 [pdf995.com], which is ad-supported (or was last I used it).
PDFCreator [wurzel6.de], which is free and open-source.
I know there are others, those are just the two I've used - successfully, I might add.
I'll second the PDFCreator recommendation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PDF Printer Driver (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.primopdf.com/ [primopdf.com]
http://www.pdf995.com/ [pdf995.com]
http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.ht
http://www.paehl.com/pdf/ [paehl.com]
M$ version of PDF (Score:2)
Embrace ***
Extend
Extinguish
It wont be too long before we all have to have Microsoft Document Reader (tm) installed somewhere on our boxen!
Re:M$ version of PDF (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:M$ version of PDF (Score:4, Interesting)
Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
OpenOffice.Org... (Score:3, Informative)
But, let me be one of the first to say - "Its about freakin' TIME!"
Re:OpenOffice.Org... (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet the PDFs written with MS Office will be very bloated (like the HTML format is).
BS Regarding the 30,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BS Regarding the 30,000 (Score:3, Interesting)
PDF in Vista? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Oh, *really*? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, how's about you, me, and a few thousands of our friends search for OpenDocument support [microsoft.com]?
Re:Oh, *really*? (Score:2)
microsoft bashing (Score:2, Insightful)
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 an
So Does Massachusetts (Score:2, Insightful)
PDF --- A Relic of the Age of Paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PDF --- A Relic of the Age of Paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:PDF --- A Relic of the Age of Paper (Score:2, Insightful)
1) When writing an academic text you invariable reference your sources (otherwise its, obviously, plagarism). PDF is useful because you (usually) get a scan of the original article, with the
Totally true! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, though, that's a lot of standards work. We might need a standards body [w3.org] to oversee it. Maybe someday, people will start to encode information in this format [wikipedia.org] so that we can view it comfortable on our monitors without fucking around with stupid documents [goldmark.org].
-=-
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.
Re:Totally true! (Score:3, Informative)
XML has absolutely NO software support. I can painstakingly write this great XML file by hand, using either a long, complex Tutorial [brics.dk] which I can hopefully bend to my needs, or by reading the several pages of specification [w3.org] packed with technical garbage. Fine. Now what the fuck do I view it in? What do my recipients view it in?
On the other hand, to create a PDF, I can create the content with my application of choice and print to a PDF distiller (of
Viewer, not format (Score:3, Informative)
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
ahhhhh!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
native support for the PDF document format
In other words,
native support for the Portable Document Format document format
Re:ahhhhh!!! (Score:4, Funny)
If that's true, I'll be able to export my PIN number to the PDF document format and store it on my RAID array...
Re:ahhhhh!!! (Score:2)
Re:ahhhhh!!! (Score:2)
And yet I've been doing this in OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
The chairs are flying everywhere... (Score:2)
What's the bets that this 'innovative' native Office12 support for pdf will only really display properly in Office 12???
This is all to get back in with Massachusetts but will enable them to foist their perverted XML into the mix.
.pdf for Microsoft Office is self amputation. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What's with the ranting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [msdn.com]. 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...
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if Microsoft will suffer any sort of anti-competitive lawsuits over this measure
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
I can't believe it (Score:3, Insightful)
Ob sig (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:5, Informative)
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.
P.S. Avalon versus Quartz (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:2)
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought it was the opposite: that they extended the JVM to support proprietary, "Windows-only" features. They could try doing the same to PDF, but Adobe clearly has the IP rights to the PDF spec.
Re:So what does this do to thier "competing" forma (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Microsoft innovation: the sincerest flattery (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:OpenOffice (Score:2, Troll)
Linux has SDL - but it came after DirectX and is nowhere near as good. OpenGL is good too, but the audio support is not stellar to say the least. Also, OpenGL is targetted at engineering apps and
Re:OpenOffice (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OpenOffice (Score:3, Informative)
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 ag
Re:OpenOffice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't this somehow infringe? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Doesn't this somehow infringe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This just makes OpenOffice doomed. (Score:2)
Despite what other people will no doubt say about how they won't read resumes send in word format, I'ld wager than 90% of human-resources staff don't read or post on slashdot, and if their standard-image computer with standard corporate software can't open the resume, then it doesn't get opened.
Many companies even state that it MUST be in word format.
Re:same old (Score:3, Funny)
If it was OSS, they would call it something like Office 11.0.0.1 .
are you saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Microsoft Office (Score:3, Funny)