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"

How "native"? Importing too?

[codergeek42]

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...

Now if only...

[Deacon_Yermouf]

... 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 [oldversion.com].

4.5 years after OS X had PDF file output standard

[XavierItzmann]

OS X 10.0 (Cheetah), March 24, 2001
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X [wikipedia.org]

"Redmond, start your photocopiers"

So... Let me get this straight...

[Chordonblue]

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.

PDF Printer Driver

[mlewan]

A solution that would be kinder to the competition would be to have a system wide PDF printer driver, like MacOS X has. In that way you could print to PDF from any application.

Isn't there such a thing hanging around as freeware already in Windows, btw?

ughhhh....

[commodoresloat]

The new Word looks like a nightmare. I'm glad I use it on a Mac. Native PDF support's been in the OS for a while so that's never been an issue. Hell, under MacOS 7.5+ I could print to PDF from Word using third-party extensions.

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.

BS Regarding the 30,000

[SerpentMage]

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 [zdnet.co.uk]) and not because "the customer" wanted it. BECAUSE the customer has wanted it for ages!

PDF in Vista?

[broothal]

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.

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

[Doppler00]

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.

ahhhhh!!!

[GimmeFuel]

Anyone else cringe when they read this?

native support for the PDF document format

In other words,

native support for the Portable Document Format document format

Re:PDF --- A Relic of the Age of Paper

[Arandir]

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.

Re:BS Regarding the 30,000

[killjoe]

It's amazing to me. One of it's large customers wants open document format and they give them PDF instead. So much for listening to your customers.

Re:How "native"? Importing too?

[MichaelSmith]

documents were distributed in PDF format specifically because they were read-only.

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.

.pdf for Microsoft Office is self amputation.

[more]

Microsoft has three legs: .doc, win32 api and wabi.

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.

Re:OpenOffice.Org...

[Bio]

What I usually do in my role as webmaster when I receive a Word doc for presentation: Open it in OpenOffice, export as PDF and upload it to the website. The PDFs are very slim. And it's easy.

I bet the PDFs written with MS Office will be very bloated (like the HTML format is).

Re:How "native"? Importing too?

[legirons]

"I worked for a major engineering firm for a few years, and documents were distributed in PDF format specifically because they were read-only.

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."

If I want to assure readers that one of my documents is accurate, I just right-click, PGP, "sign" and type a passphrase. Then if someone wants to check that it hasn't been tampered with, they just double-click on the signature and it comes up green if it's OK, or red if it's been modified.

So that works with any type of document, and also means you only need to store one copy, rather than an editable version and a PDF version.

Admittedly, that's not your point, that being able to edit PDFs would screw your old company's document policy. But how do you know that's not already possible? It's an open format after all, and it sounds like you don't bother with electronic signatures.

Re:Open Document?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's easy! Just click on this pre-filled search link for "OpenDocument format support" [microsoft.com] 30,000 times a week and you will get OpenDocument format support in MS Office!

Re:Viewer, not format

[Prior Puss]

When I browse round the internet, there's a little inward groan every time I realise I'm going to have to click a link that has (PDF) after it. It's like driving down a motorway and suddenly seeing a 30MPH limit sign. The IE plugin is unbelievably slow on everything I've tested it on - it's always quicker to download the file to desktop and then run it into the standalone viewer, then rely on the IE plugin. Firefox is faster, but has little hiccups and crashes when you try to close a tab containing a PDF. As for the reader itself... does anyone else sit there watching those messages flash past on the splash screen get reminded of the joke messages from Maxis software? Reticulating splines, please wait... Inverting career ladder, please wait... Multiplying mammal matrix...

It's still painfully slow even on a fast machine (yeah, okay, I'm impatient). I hope MS manages to do it a bit faster and cleaner in their own implementation.

Of course, I really hoped that the rest of the world, like me, would feel no need to upgrade to Vista/Orifice12, and this might work against that hope...

Re:Doesn't this somehow infringe?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:M$ version of PDF

[tonywestonuk]

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.

Re:how'd you like to be in adobe's shoes?

[mark_lybarger]

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.

Re:Try Foxit PDF Reader

[lahvak]

This is interesting. On Windows, you have Foxit. On OS X the Preview, on X11, ghostscript, xpdf, gpdf, kpdf and evince, at least. None of these does evrything Adobe Reader does, but they are all faster and smaller. I wonder how is this going to affect the pdf format.

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 more and better ones, I just don't seem to be able to find them right now.

Most of these things will not work in any of the small pdf viewers. I wonder if as the small viewers become more common, authors will have to avoid using any advanced features of pdf, therefore effectively dumbing down the format.

There is another great feature of adobe reader, a feature most people don't know about. In adobe reader, you can annotate, comment, and even draw on pdf files. That is great, because I could send my pdf files to proofreaders, all they need to do is open them in reader and write their comments. Why don't people know about that? Because Adobe made it in such a way that you have to specifically enable it in each frigging document using the newest vestion of the frigging Acrobat Professional!
That means if I make my document using pdflatex, it cannot be annotated, if you make your document using OpenOffice, it cannot be annotated. If you made your document using an older version of Acrobat, it cannot be annotated. And even if you used the right version of Acrobat but forgot to enable the annotation, it still cannot be annotated. As a result, very few documents you come across will have this enabled. So you have this great feature in reader which you can never use!

I wonder if competition from all these small pdf viewers will force Adobe to reconsider this IMHO very stupid decision and if they will enable annotations by default, disabling them perhaps only for encrypted/digitally signed documents.