Microsoft has said that the next version of its market-leading Office suite will be able to save documents in Adobe's ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF) format, a popular method of sharing documents between different computers and software programs. Presently, Office users have to use a third-party PDF-creation package, such as Adobe's Acrobat.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. A PDF file can describe documents containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device independent and resolution independent format.

These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, colour, and images. PDF is an open standard, and anyone may write applications that can read or write PDFs royalty-free.

In addition to encapsulating text and graphics, PDF files are most appropriate for encoding the exact look of a document in a device-independent way. In contrast, markup languages such as HTML defer many display decisions to a rendering device such as a browser, and will not look the same on different computers. Free readers for many platforms are available.

Being able to save Office documents as PDFs was a feature that more than 120,000 users have requested every month, said Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's senior vice president of Office product development. Sinofsky did not say whether there would be any extra costs involved in being able to save Office documents as PDF files, but hinted that the feature could be included in Office for free.

BIOS, Oct 03, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Business