pdf

A new plan by Microsoft to allow its Office software to save and edit files in a rival format will face a probe by the European Commission.

The Commission said late Wednesday that it will investigate whether Microsoft's decision to add support for the Open Document Format to Office will result in greater consumer choice.

Microsoft's move, also announced Wednesday, is seen as a concession to regulators concerned about competition and to customers, mainly governments, worried about product lock-in.

"The Commission will investigate whether the announced support of Open Document Format in Office leads to better interoperability … Read more

Microsoft is opening up Office to other file formats, slowly but steadily.

On Wednesday, the company said it plans to add new formats to Office 2007, including the OpenDocument Format (ODF), Portable Document Format (PDF), and XML Paper Specification (XPS). The new formats will be added to Office as part of Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, due in the first half of next year.

ODF, a rival document format to Office's native format, has become popular with governments and schools. Microsoft, acknowledging requests for compatibility with ODF, released a converter to allow Word users to open documents saved … Read more

The May 15th issue of the Support Alert newsletter has an interesting article on converting PDF files into Word documents. Initially, the newsletter author, Ian Richards, tested a couple free online conversion services, then he got readers with seven different commercial products to convert his sample document.

He called the results "fascinating" and found that "the products varied markedly". The most expensive product produced one the worst conversions. Overall, he likes Zamzar, a free web-based conversion service, saying "Most users who have only a casual need to convert PDFs to DOC should save their pennies … Read more

It's time to replace that bloated, sluggish PDF reader everybody on the planet has been using with something leaner, faster, and--no, really--easier to use. Join Seth Rosenblatt as he takes a First Look at the freeware Foxit PDF Reader.

PrimoPDF converts just about any file type to a PDF, using the source program the file was created with and its print command. Two new changes make the program easier to use and more useful. The interface redesign is definitely easier to navigate, and users can now choose to e-mail the PDF instantly after its creation.

The conversion process from whatever document is on your screen to PDF is quick and efficient. Other features include secure formatting that allows the user to wrap the PDF in 40-bit or 128-bit encryption, PDF merging, and password protection. The user also can restrict … Read more

Fast to load and yet possessing robust features, Foxit PDF Reader is a strong freeware alternative to the dominance of the Adobe Reader. The new features in version 2.3 include two notable improvements, a slew of minor ones, and small tweak that goes a long way to put Foxit on nearly equal footing with its better-known competitors.

Foxit now supports tabbed PDF reading, porting the feature from Web browsers into the world of documents. This is a no-brainer, and makes it much easier for having multiple PDFs open simultaneously.

The other important improvement is that Foxit now supports multimedia … Read more

Adobe Reader is monstrously large, slow to load, and includes many features most users will hardly ever need. Foxit PDF Reader pares down its PDF-reading code and comes up with some neat features, like annotation tools, to give you a PDF reader that's far more appropriate for the average PDF user.

PDFs open from the Internet in their own Foxit window, instead of sucking browser resources, and the interface mimics Adobe's so you won't have to change your reading habits. In our test, the text readability wasn't much inferior to Acrobat's. The 1.6MB program … Read more

Yudu Freedom is a new entrant to the world of online document publishing. Like Scribd, it lets you take PDF files from your hard drive and host them online for free. The files can be viewed a little faster than with Adobe's Acrobat reader, and it runs entirely in Flash with that neat page turning effect you might have seen in other document hosting services such as Issuu and Idio.

Yudu promises that any document you upload will be search engine optimized, making it show up in Google, and so on. There's also a built in search tool, … Read more

The big news today in the software world is a new beta version for Mozilla Firefox. The world has been sitting on Version 2 for almost a year and a half now, but the open-source foundation is making sure that Version 3 is fully baked before releasing a final version.

The latest beta release promises "more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta," but a large number of those improvements are back end and mostly invisible. Two significant features in the fourth beta that I appreciate are: an improved password manager toolbar that replaces the old semifunctional dialog; … Read more