Edit PDFs with OpenOffice

June 6, 2008 Education, GNU/Linux, Mac, MGuhlin.net, TechTips

Image: Hybrid butterflies – http://tinyurl.com/65zl99

What fantastic news! OpenOffice will support read/write PDF files!

Hybrid PDFs provide the best of both worlds: consistent display anywhere
via its PDF component, and editability via its ODF component. “Most
applications (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) ignore the ODF bits and
treat the whole hybrid file as a normal PDF. Presentation is pixel
perfect. Wait. That’s not all. OpenOffice.org 3.0 with this extension
treats the hybrid as a normal ODF, so the ODF document opens in Writer,
Impress, Calc, or Draw according on the original. (You didn’t just
expect Writer, did you?) Now you have lossless, editable, round-trip
PDFs.”
via Benjamin
Horst at SolidOffice

The source
article shares:

Combine the viewing and printing portability of a PDF with the editing
capabilities of OpenDocument Format. "Have your cake and eat it too,"
promises ODF is embedded in PDF. To export hybrid PDF files, you need
the (inaccurately named) PDF import extension which adds a new checkbox
to the PDF export dialog box. To import hybrid files, you also need this
extension.

One downside of this hybrid system is adoption by
users will be slow. Especially at first, not everyone will have
OpenOffice.org 3.0 and this extension. Other applications may not adopt
support for hybrid PDF-ODFs, but the genius is the dual-format strategy
mitigates the problem, so everyone will gain at least some use from
these hybrids. Another downside is hybrid documents are larger files
because some of the information is duplicated.

Test this extension in OpenOffice.org 3.0 or later. Though 3.0 comes out
in September, the 3.0
beta and developers
snapshots are available now. Currently the developer snapshot
DEV300_m14 is newer than 3.0 beta. Remember this
extension is not yet a stable 1.0 release. PDF import extension builds
are currently available for
Linux and for
Mac courtesy of Pavel Janik. For Windows, check back soon.
Eventually, the extension will be on the OpenOffice.org extensions web
site.

Pretty amazing! Imagine everyone being able to import hybrid PDFs and
then make edits. I love OpenOffice 3.0 on my Mac…it has worked
exceedingly well and blows previous versions of OpenOffice out of the
water! Although I won’t be throwing away Keynote yet, I have to say that
Word and Pages are gone.