Creating PDF files from Word
The other day, Sally called to ask about creating a PDF file from a Word document. We eventually decided that the easiest path was for her to send me the file for conversion. That’s easy for me, because I’m using Word 2004 for Mac: I can print to a PDF file just as easily as I can print to my Epson Stylus C68. The trouble is that Microsoft appears to intend on disabling that capability in future versions. Why? Because Adobe is suing them over it.My best understanding of the situation is that Microsoft placed the capability in the MacOS X versions of Word because Apple made that rediculously easy. I can print to a PDF file from nearly any MacOS X program: it’s built into the standard print dialog. I don’t know if there are some versions of Word for Windows that do the same, but I get the feeling there are from some of the articles I’ve read on this topic. Post a comment if you use a version of Word for Windows with this capability. My understanding is that it would be much more difficult to implement on that platform. Then again, microsoft would throw much greater development resources to that platform anyway.
Sally asked my opinion of why this situation existed, and I had to explain Microsoft’s intentions to release a competing technology to PDF. My guess is that this is all just part of the document wars that Microsoft seems to be waging. My question is why this battle is related? The document wars are between Microsoft’s proprietary format and OpenDocument, and those are formats intended for editing documents. PDF is a defacto standard for read only documents. I think the world is a better place if those two document formats are completely distinct.