Microsoft PDF and XPS Add-ins and the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh

Jeff Bell — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:28:00 GMT

It has been great to see the web buzz over the past few days over the availability on the Microsoft Download Center of the Microsoft Add-ins for Office 2007 for Save as PDF and Save as XPS. The better news comes today that you can now actually use these with the public release of the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh. (The add-ins are specifically for Office 2007, and if you had Beta 2, then you already had the Beta 2 versions of these.)

While the PDF and XPS export add-ins are still at a beta stage, we have made a number of improvements since beta 2, so I encourage you to send your most complex documents through. If you use screen readers or other accessibility tools, let us know about our document structure tagging. If you submit documents to governments or archiving systems that require ISO-standard PDF, try out the ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) support. If you have a PDF print workflow, send add-in generated documents through it. If you are already providing us with Office beta feedback (thank you), you can keep using the channels that work for you. If you are looking for a new way to provide feedback, you can use the Publisher 2007 Connect site for all PDF and XPS add-in feedback. (PDF and XPS bugs are most useful to us when you include the original Office document as well as the PDF or XPS.)

To view PDF files, you need a PDF reader. (Adobe Reader is a popular one.)

To view XPS files, you need an XPS reader. If you have Windows Vista RC1, then you should be set already. If you are running Windows XP (or 2000 or 2003), you can download the XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack to view XPS documents. Beta 2 of this pack was recently released.

Viewing (and sharing) Publisher files

Jeff Bell — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 04:55:00 GMT

I seem to have become a top search engine result for queries for a Microsoft Publisher Viewer. The bad news is that there is no Microsoft Publisher Viewer. The good news is that we have a better solution to this problem coming with Publisher 2007. Every time we look at doing a Publisher Viewer, we run into the problem of how to get enough distribution that people could reliably share Pub files and count on the viewer being available at the other end. We also think there is a limit to the number of single-application viewers that people want to download. Instead what customers have long been asking us for is a way to get Publisher content into application-independent viewable formats.

For Publisher 2007, we plan to make available free add-ins from Microsoft that enable the generation of both PDF and XPS files from Pub. PDF viewers are widely deployed today, and XPS viewers are starting to become available. As they do for earlier versions of Publisher, we also expect that third parties will offer their own solutions for capturing and sharing output from Publisher.

For current versions of Publisher, your best bets for sharing Pub content electronically are printing to the Microsoft Office Document Imaging format (a viewer is part of various versions of Microsoft Office) or saving or printing through one of the various third-party tools that generate PDF.

Somewhat off topic, I also want to call out the Publisher Connect web site, which is a great way to provide us feedback. We recently put up this site and don't have a lot of content there right now, but we do have a way to provide feedback to the product team that won't bottleneck through me. For Publisher support questions, please see the Microsoft Publisher 2003 Help and Support Center on Microsoft Office Online. I cannot provide product support through this blog.

On Microsoft Publisher and more : PDF

Microsoft PDF and XPS Add-ins and the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh

Viewing (and sharing) Publisher files