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MSOffice 12 to support PDF


2005-10-04

Brian Jones announced that Microsoft Office version 12 will support creating Adobe Acrobat PDF directly.

This is good to hear, since PDF files are widely supported.

I am interested to see how good the PDFs are. Will they have all the metadata? It should, since it seems pretty easy to do. Will they have the tagging and structure that the original documents have (at least as much as possible)? Adobe has been adding accessibility features that hopefully will be supported. Will it support encryption, digital signatures and other security features? How big will the files be? The difference between Adobe's Distiller and PDFWriter can be shocking.

The other question is why the MSOffice team is doing this, and not the base operating system team? It is definitely a feature that would make people consider upgrading. I wonder if Microsoft thinks it is better to have people upgrade to MSOffice 12 than to upgrade to Vista?

Tags: microsoft pdf

File Formats: MSOffice PDF