Save as PDF in Office "12"

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

anon — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 08:23:34 GMT

So this effectively recognizes that the "Office 2003 document image writer" printer driver was a bad idea when it comes to sharing document snapshots with others?

Outputting document snapshots using the lowest common denominator file format is a very old idea. That's for all comments from MS guys saying that alternatives to MS Office are not too advanced feature wise.

What motivates you in writing PDF when just everybody interested in this uses a PDF printer driver already, or more robust Adobe products for that matter? I mean, you have added PDF support in all applications because that PDF generator would be slightly better than average generators out there? Hard to justify.

In Office 12 you get a new XML-based binary file format and, in parallel some other team over there are making document layout fit into XPS? That does not seem to make sense to generate PDF instead of XPS, or consistent? For instance, if PDF is generated from the XPS then it proves that both XPS and XML are robust enough to at least support this common scenario. Besides, this could show some alternative revenue streams for small ISVs feeling they are screwed with what you are doing.

You are going to have a hard time justifying that this whole PDF thing of late is not motivated on investing towards the __perception__ that the coming version of Office is "open". PDF is open standard. All while dev teams are adding stuff that have their own merit.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Mnn — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 08:25:15 GMT

Hello Cyndy:
Thanks for breaking this down.
However, forgive me for this, but is the 'Save As' functionality a one-way road; i.e., can I reopen and re-edit the PDF file in Office 12 without having to use Acrobat?
Thanks
Mnn

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

msvista — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 08:43:36 GMT

Thanks Cyndy. As Mnn asked, can we open the PDF file in office 12 and re-edit the document ? How about the reader ? Do we still that bulky sucker Acrobat to view this or Office 12 has natibe way to read PDF also ?

Thanks

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

imtiyaz — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:48:21 GMT

Hi Cyndy,
i am also want to know, what Mnn asked?

Thanks
Imtiyaz

PDF Preservation of the Document

orcmid — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 18:35:08 GMT

Welcome Cyndy,

I particularly like the observation about "supporting complete customer scenarios around content." Everything to stand in the customer's world sounds like a net plus to me. I find this refreshing and think it is an exciting development.

I also ran my list of why I use a capable PDF plug-in, and everything and more is on your list. In particular, I love preservation of hyper-document characteristics, something the print driver can't do.

Although I think I'm on the PDF/A committee mailing list, I must confess that I haven't been reading the accumulated material. Still, it seems like something valuable to anticipate. Is there anything special needed to accomodate PDF/A and is that in your job jar?

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

John McGhie (MVP -- Word) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 10:45:51 GMT

Thanks Cyndy:

I and my customers also need an Intent of "Publishing" from Word, and the ability to embed the original in the PDF.

I do not know of any of my customers attempting publishing of business or commercial documents from Publisher -- it's not really a commercial product.

However, I and most of my customers do publish major documents directly from Word. This deals with the customers would would like to both print the thing AND re-use its content or edit it.

It's more important than it sounds: Businesses generally send PDF to prevent arguments with the customer later about what exactly the document they sent "said". However, it would normally be more convenient for both the sender and the recipient of they could send useable text along with the PDF.

This is the way the New South Wales and South Australian Governments now require Responses to Requests for Proposals (Requests for Tenders). I am not sure about the Australian Federal Government, but I think it does the same. Respondents are required to ship a specified number of printed and bound copies, and a CD containing a PDF and a Microsoft Word or RTF original.

The PDF is there for verification purposes: the one they are going to chop up for the evaluation team to use is the Word copy :-)

Cheers

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Ron Hary Rashim Ltd. — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:14:36 GMT

Hello Cindy
Congratulations for the new blog. We were realy waiting for some help around this particular issue.
We need a similar feature to apply a server side mail merge mechanism to publish some personal documents such as contracts in a secure document structure.
Now, for scalability reasons we would like to use some server side code without using the word application, which is intended to be a client side application.
Our Scenario has 4 steps:
1. Creating the Main Document (Template)
We let our clients to edit the word 12 main documents, adding fields.
Just as they used to do with a standard mail merge application, only we save the
documents as XML, this is done on the client side machine.
2. Our clients costumers have a web application where they can
require a personal document
3. Server Side Data Manipulation.
We already developed the code the can manipulate the word-ml xml documents
inserting the costumer personal data into the field locations, the works great,
with no word application.
4. Now we need a server side application that will deliver the final pdf document
We tried some converters but they work very purely with right to left Hebrew text
BiDi etc. If we could use a Microsoft originated server side conversion, I'm sure it
will be the right solution.

re: Mnn

Jordan Windebank — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 07:15:35 GMT

There would be no need to reopen the PDF file, as you would just open the Word document, make your changes, and 'Save As' to PDF file again.

Cyndy, thanks for the info so far, looking forward to any future tidbits you'll be able to relase to us.

Regards,
Jordan

re: Mnn

Jordan Windebank — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 07:16:29 GMT

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Tony — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 09:57:35 GMT

One of the reasons my company uses PDF formats is because they can be locked to prevent further changes (see also John's comment).
Is the save-as pdf a one-way street (or at least optionally can be so)? Also, given the number of other pdf drivers out there, I'm still not entirely clear what extra benefits this new feature is intended to provide?

PS I'm enjoying reading all the new blogs about Office 12 - it looks like a lot of good stuff coming in this version.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Geir Nøklebye — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:01:03 GMT

Hi, it is interesting to see that the PDF discussion only seems to revolve around the Windows version of Office 12, so I'd like you to get everyone up to speed on how this will be implemented in Mac Office 12, and how this will differ from the systemwide "Save as to PDF..." which is standard in Mac OS X. – A feature that in essence gives Office.mac 2004 the capability that has now been announced for Office 12.

Logical next question is why don't you go the full length and provide a Save to PDF at the system level in Windows? Why only limit yourself to Office?

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

John C. Welch — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:53:36 GMT

Geir,

What Office Mac has is what the system provides, essentially a "screen dump to PDF". Since what is on the screen is ALSO PDF, this is relatively simple.

What Office 12 Win is proposing is far closer to what the Adobe plugins for Win Office provide. (Yes, they are on the Mac too, but are nothing more than a one-step version of the "screen dump to PDF" with the Adobe Printer instead of the System PDF creator) I know for my part, this would be a HUGE feature on the Mac side as well, it's one that a lot of people have asked for, at least since Acrobat 5, and it's one that Adobe has ignored. Done and marketed correctly, this would be a huge point for upgrading to Office 12 on the Mac.

I know you all talk to the Mac BU folks regularly, so PLEASE make this one of those common features.

Oh yeah, does this mean that there will be proper support for embedded PDF in Word/PPT/Excel on Windows finally?

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

FARfetched — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:06:15 GMT

Hi Cyndy, thanks for jumping in. Looks like you guys are going about this one the right way.

Geir, if I'm reading this right, the primary difference between Office-PDF and OSX-PDF is that Office can make use of PDF features that can make PDFs more interactive than just a piece of electronic paper. I do a lot of writing with FrameMaker, which supports advanced PDF options such as bookmarks and links, and (if used properly) can make reading a PDF online much easier. I will defer to Cyndy, of course, for clarification (I'm just an interested user).

Being able to save as PDF from Visio could be huge. One recurring gripe on a FrameMaker list I subscribe to is the absolute fugliness of Visio docs exported to just about anything. A decent PDF coming out of Visio is going to make a <b>lot</b> of tech writers happy, believe you me.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Mr. Dee — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:43:47 GMT

Mnn, thats what I would love find out too. Its one thing to create it, but when it comes to editing the PDF, that would be just awesome. I suspect it won't though, because what would be need of Acrobat Professional then, unless the Office Team licenses that technology from Adobe.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Maciej Rutkowski — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 10:34:54 GMT

I don't know if PDF has that much extensible, but it would be nice if there was an option to embed the original Office document in the PDF so that Office could open it for editing, then save the document and automatically generate a new version of the PDF containing it. Of course the extension would have to be transparent for non-supporting products and both documents would have to share rich media (e.g. embedded images) for the "editable-PDF" to keep small.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Cyndy Wessling — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:35:42 GMT

Hi--thanks for your comments so far. To answer one of your questions, saving as PDF from Office applications is a publish, one-way only operation. We are not creating a viewer or doing any special work to enable PDF files to be opened, viewed, and/or edited in Office applications. The publish action does not alter the original file, so we'd expect this to work as Mnn describes, editing the original file and publishing or re-publishing to PDF.

I'm working on another full post with answers to more of your questions.

-Cyndy

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

joelfinkle — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 23:07:30 GMT

There are a number of apps which generate bookmarks and hyperlinks when generating PDF from Word, and few of them do it well. Actually, hyperlinks are kind of obvious, as they're based clearly on Word fields (REF, PAGEREF, FOOTNOTEREF), footnotes and hyperlinks.

Bookmarks take more thought. Ostensibly, you'd want to duplicate the capabilities of the TOC (but some docs don't have TOCs, and you'd still want bookmarks -- that probably means the doc should have had a TOC anyway). That means supporting multiple TOCs/Lists of Figures, so that you can have the main TOC and a *subsequent* list of tables, list of figures, list of appendices.

Sometimes, browsing a doc's list of TOCs will give you an ugly result, such as a 'high-level' TOC at the start, and chapter-based detail TOCs: you wouldn't want to go (abbreviated) 1, 2, 3... 10, 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2, 1.2.1..., 1.10, 2.1...

So the same *rules* for TOCs apply (by outline, by style list, by caption type) plus 'fixed' items (such as "Table of Contents" and "List of Figures") to frame them.
(Note: in my mind, the "TOC" field needs a caption property, and this would solve a lot of programming for me).

Acrobat doesn't do this, Adlib doesn't do this, Neevia Docuprinter doesn't do this, Documentum Content Rendition Services doesn't do this. Only an enterprise-wide publishing package that I'll not name (because our company competes directly with them on some products) does it.

I'd be happy to help spec this out -- how you store the info in the document is the tricky part.

Joel Finkle, PMP
Director, Product Services
Image Solutions, Inc.
joel.finkle@imagesolutions.com

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Thomas Müller — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:29:47 GMT

Dear Cyndy Wessling,
I am pleased to hear about your plans, to build an export function 'Save as PDF in Office "12"'.

From my point of view as a consultant for more than 25 years, my clients are not struggling that much over making PDF. What is more important from my point of view is: "Place PDF in Office application"

In larger organizations and in the World Wide Web PDF has become a file format for whole documents and for media assets like graphic arts, logos, diagrams and so on.

See the nearly 2 million PPT presentation files, distributed as PDF to the Web.

My clients and I myself needs an import function for PDF very much. EPS as a powerful exchange format for combined bitmap and vector content is gone - PDF is even more powerful and easier to handle.

I appreciate your comments on that topic.

Best regards
Thomas Müller

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re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

zeroone2 — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:43:44 GMT

Will MS Office PDF documents be as straight forward to edit as in ScanSofts PaperPort?

Have found it tedious having to move to a seperate graphics application to do this and then find it requires further considerations due to the formats becomeing distorted. Whilst this is not a big deal for the everyday user of Acrobat it can be very frustrating. Especially if in Paperport this is not a feature and the changes are what you see is what you get.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Michael Byrnes — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:18:16 GMT

2 Issues with Word 12 and PDFs.

1. 'Save as' PDF does not seem to have more specific options, such as embedding OTF, type 1 fonts, etc.

2. Interoperability with Adobe Acrobat seems not have been implemented yet... PDFMaker COM add-in appears to be enable in Word Options, but PDFMaker's icons (and macros) cannot be accessed via its default toolbar, or a customized toolbar.

Regards,

Michael

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

John Waterworth — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 18:44:34 GMT

Hi Cyndy,

One of the best features of PDF for online documents is Named Destinations. If a pdf file has named destinations then a web page or application can link to a named point in the pdf file.

We use this in our user and developer guides to support links to specific topics -- e.g. a knowledgebase article about an issue with setting up users can link to the appropriate section in the online copy of the administration guide.

There are third party tools for managing named destinations but they are quite awkward to use.

Can you please include support for named desinations in the Save as PDF.

Thanks
john.waterworth@eqos.com

Word 2007: sneak peak

Joe Friend: Microsoft Office Word — Thu, 11 May 2006 18:14:13 GMT

I returned to Microsoft (after a 7 year hiatus) in late 2003 just as the Office 2007 effort was getting...

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Diablos — Fri, 26 May 2006 10:24:19 GMT

Hi Cyndy,

Thank you very much for working to give us that really more than great application, I just have a comment ( or question ) regardin saving as PDF,

I want to make a PDF (or XPS) of a word document that the size of its papers is A4, the output is always with the size of a letter, and everything outside is clipped !!!

I tried to see any options to change so that the output is the desired, i couldn't find, is there any ?

Follow-up on PDF legal issues

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There have been a ton of really great comments and questions today in relation to the news that we are...

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

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re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

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re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Henry Rzepa — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:09:29 GMT

Noted in Cyndy's original posting is the preservation of Document properties, ie the metadata properties. PDF (Acrobat) handles this with XMP. Will the metadata expression honour XMP? The X in XMP is extensible. I presume that provided the metadata is namespaced in eg core.xml, that Word 12 can easily cope with extended metadata schemas?

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

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re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Steve Bechtolt — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:16:29 GMT

We have Office:Mac and when printing a document with the "save as PDF" option which has hyperlinks, the hyperlinks won't work in the PDF file

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Ashutosh Singh — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 05:36:06 GMT

I only wanted to know about the file format of a PDF document. So that I can read from a PDF file and write to a PDF File from my own software.

I you can answer it for me please email me at:

er_ashutosh_singh@hotmail.com

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Colombia — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 04:59:27 GMT

Hey, i have some problems with that function, the images inserted in the Word documents had a bad quality later in the PDF file no matter if i selected no compression in the document.

I solve it importing the images in PNG format.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Mikel Ward — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:18:59 GMT

I downloaded the Microsoft Save As PDF plug-in and tried saving my my two-page resume as a PDF.

If I use Cambria, the file size is 182 KB, even tho Cambria is listed as an embedded font. For some reason Arial (”ArialMT”) is also embedded.

If I use only Arial, the file size goes down to 65 KB.

If I save as PDF from OpenOffice 2, the file size is 43 KB, with Cambria embedded, with no apparent loss of formatting.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Alan Drout — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:15:40 GMT

"Internal and External Hyperlinks—PDF documents preserve internal and external hyperlinks assigned to text and other objects in the original file"

Only hyperlinked text will be preserved. Hyperlinked pictures or graphics will not work once converted to pdf.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Kai Leppanen — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:13:39 GMT

Hyperlinks cause the system to go to the Web first then to the linked document. I don't want the link to the Web unless I request it ! I should be able to have the option to have either or whithout the nuisence of turning off the Web Connection !!

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

PDF Converter — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:57:58 GMT

Nice to see that Microsoft is finally offering a greater support for the PDF format, which is becoming a standard in many industries. Many businesses will benefit from an easy way to convert Word to PDF documents without having to install additional software although we are still far away from a server-side PDF convertion automation.

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Guus — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:33:28 GMT

Nice to have a 'native' way of creating PDF documents from a Office doc, but I use a lot of embedded Excel sheets and these look terrible in the final PDF result.

When using, say pdfFactory, it looks great.

Some more work for your team, Cindy?

re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

Ognian Tschakalov — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:03:38 GMT

Hello,

I like your plug in a lot, since it is an easy way to create a pdf without additional software. But I noticed a big problem with picture quality in the resulting pdf, although I used a .png as suggested. My picture has a native resolution of 600 dpi, it is also zoomed down to 30%. In Word the picture looks great but as a pdf the picture looks like 72dpi or so. Any ideas?

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re: Save as PDF in Office "12"

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