I tried it last week, and it worked great. (My review is in the link.) As you mentioned, I noticed forms don't input---that's understandable at this point. One concern was the slowness compared to opening a Draw document in OOo or a PDF in Acrobat Reader, but I suppose editing PDFs is generally not a repetitive task? Can you import hyperlinks? Overall, great job.

Posted by Andrew Ziem on June 11, 2008 at 10:55 PM CEST #

Hi,
first thanks for the extensions. It works fine for a Beta. I found to issues (one about formating of text and the other about graphic import): Issue 90700 and 90702. If you need more information don't hesitate to contact me.

Bests,
Andreas

Posted by Andreas Mantke on June 13, 2008 at 04:45 PM CEST #

Hello,

my first experiments with PDF import were very promising. Really great.
Two things I noticed:

- justified text is left aligned after import
- helvetica should be substituted with arial

Thanks!

Posted by Thomas Klein on June 15, 2008 at 02:35 PM CEST #

Alguém poderia me informar como instalar o complemento de forma que todos os usuários do computador ( e não somente o usuário que instalou) possa usar a nova funcionalidade de importação de arquivos PDF ?
Problema: Ao clicar sobre o arquivo pdfimport-win32 (versão windows) e instalar o mesmo só funciona para o perfil do usuário que o instalou. Outros usuários não conseguem usar a nova funcionalidade de importação de arquivos PDF a não ser cada um instale novamente em seu perfil.
Desde já agradeço a vossa atenção.

Posted by Raphael on June 17, 2008 at 05:19 PM CEST #

Hi Artem,

I just came across a discussion at our users mailinglist - several users discussing, how easy it was to implement "the correct PDF-Import" :)

Anyway - this reminded me to just say thanks for the job you (and some others) have done. The import filter does a really good job and imports almost all of relevant elements with correct layout. I've triede some software documentations (up to 200 pages) and presentations. Only problems I saw were graphic objects with transparencys and PDF files, where the correct font was not embedded and not available on my system.

Thanks,

André

Posted by André Schnabel on June 17, 2008 at 06:28 PM CEST #

Hallo,

For two years we ( PMG is a Belgian editing Compagny) we uses OO to produce over 6.000 fullcolor magazine pages. We let our editors produce their pages using dedicated fonts and RGB lowres images stored into the writerdocs. When making the CMYK-PDF's we first replace the RGB images with CMYK eps and then we using Acrobat to make the final CMYK-PDF.
The OO-Hybrid PDF solution sould be a excelent way to send our pages to users who do not uses OO our not have our Fonts on there machines BUT without the transfer of our FONTS the PDF-import and export is USELESS. I supose its a legal mather but ALL profesional graphic users worldwide include there fonts in PDF's .....
With this limitation you make every PDF effort you made in OO useless for graphic implementations

Fernand

Posted by Fernand Vanrie on June 18, 2008 at 10:44 AM CEST #

Sorry, affter some investigation i found:

No legal question, simly a Font-embedding issue who waits to be solved for years with 164 votes...
PLeas edo something about it, it realy makes all your efforts useless

Fernand

Posted by Fernand Vanrie on June 18, 2008 at 12:03 PM CEST #

Fernand,

Useless for you does not mean useless for all. In my experience, most people use and have Microsoft fonts (mainly Arial and Times New Roman). Did you add two votes for the font embedding issue?

Posted by Andrew Ziem on June 18, 2008 at 05:56 PM CEST #

Andrew,
I even try to spend all my votes :-) but i think that this issue has to be split in several parts. For us: Opentype Fonts works fine withOO-writer under XP and i do not understand wath is the problem to embed this fonts in a PDF-doc

Wath i mean with "all" is that te vast majorty of "general user documents" who must be tranfered to PDF have a more complex layout with the use of al sorts of Funy fonts. The more professional users use "Company standard layouts" who mostly where designed by pro's who have the habit to choice for design orientated fonts so....

Posted by Fernand on June 18, 2008 at 06:48 PM CEST #

Sorry, but it's really unbelievable that there are still people putting efforts in creating an “edit PDF” application/plug-in. Editing PDF files is a “no go” if you try to work professional, means business work in every kind of industry! PDF was made for exchanging documents visually, not for editing! If your solution does not support the whole PDF specification and you're losing or changing content data in the wrong way, it will be useless!!!

It would be better to put more efforts in improving the usability of OO and the workflow around documents... and for example the PDF export (export profiles, CMYK support etc.)

Posted by Frank Spangenberg on June 21, 2008 at 03:56 PM CEST #

The PDF-Import works very well, thanks for your efforts!
But I've seen some problems with
* underlines of text (too close to the text)
* presentation of text fields/formular fields
* presentation of embedded transparent pictures (black instead of white background)
* presentation of drawing lines and text in drawings (e.g. in technical drawings of data sheets)
* hyperlinks (not clickable, not editable)
I hope for a new version of the extension in the near future. :)

Posted by Thomas on June 24, 2008 at 09:20 AM CEST #

Please put a link to the how-to-install page http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/resources/user/howto_install in the About page. The how-to-install page is extremely helpful, but near-on impossible to find.

Posted by dbeshear on June 28, 2008 at 02:34 AM CEST #

I tried to create a doc file out of a latex-pdf, but the import inserts spaces randomly into the text (even into to words), also the text flow is lost.. (The text consists of a lot of text blocks, with each a few words )

=> if you need the pdf (to improve your product, please send me a email.

=> but for the first beta... a very nice try... but still improveable before it is usable.

Posted by Wolfgang on June 29, 2008 at 06:47 PM CEST #

Thanks, it worked well for my first try.
My current problem is how to save the odg as an odt file. If I manually select everything, copy and paste it into a blank odt file, it works well. Why can't I save the ODG produced directly into an ODT file?

Posted by Bruno Verachten on June 30, 2008 at 03:04 PM CEST #

When I tried to add the extension to version 3.0 b2 OpenOffice on my iMac G5 I got a message to the effect "Cannot load this extension on this machine. I suspect the problem is as with almost all beta software in this project that the extension was not compiled as a universal binary but as an Intel only. Please, if this project is going to continue to ignore PowerPC chip-based Macs during beta releases, indicate when this is the case.

I understand that it requires extra effort in some cases to support both chipsets but until Apple discontinues support for the 25% of machines that are PowerPC-based please treat us with the respect given the Intel-based machine owners. This has been a problem since before Sun joined the effort so let's see if we can end it now.

Thank you.

Posted by Joe on July 01, 2008 at 09:02 AM CEST #

Just for fun, I attempted to import a Mail in Rebate in PDF form, to see if I could fill in the rebate with OpenOffice.

Unfortunately, the imported document is missing some graphics and even some text fields are not faithfully rendered.

The document in question can be found here: http://ak.buy.com/buy_assets/retail/pdfs/08Q2/0626-0709st-rg_20logitech.pdf.

Posted by Todd on July 01, 2008 at 02:06 PM CEST #

FYI, in the above URL, the trailing "." is of course not part of the URL.

Posted by Todd on July 01, 2008 at 02:15 PM CEST #

Hi all,
I am very thankful for your feedback I am very glad to see, so many interest for this extension. Thank you for the reported bugs and thank you for the good words. I think we are on the right way to make a good product from this beta version.

Thank you,

Artem.

Posted by Artem Khvat on July 01, 2008 at 03:10 PM CEST #

I read about this ext few days back, but today only go time to test it. Good enough for editing the documents I have created using OOo PDF export. But found issues while testing to edit complex documents like http://www.bissell.com/images/UserGuides/8990.pdf ,

Issues I see are:-

1. Background transparency of images, some have when it should not have. Some do not have when it should have.

2. Background images / pattren not preserved

3. Circular shaped objects looks rectangle/square

4. Font effects not preserved, this may be an OOo issu,e as no way to specify Kerning, Tracking, Font-stretch effects in OOo.

Posted by BijuGC on July 06, 2008 at 08:05 AM CEST #

Great work. This could come in handy. I've always thought PDF support has been a distinguishing feature of OpenOffice.org and making it easier to convince people to give it a try.

I'm not so concerned about speed as the earlier commenter however for the first few seconds I was worried by the lack of visual feedback and was concerned there might be a problem with the software but the progress bars did eventually kick in. If you could tweak this to give more visual feedback that would help (I'm hoping it is possible to provide status information along the lines of "Preparing to import document").

For my test I downloaded the festival programme from a local film Festival
http://www.lightsout.ie/prog.pdf
Several images were shown upside-down, presumably a transformation was misapplied.
There were also drawings and figures not imported correctly and although I'm not too concerned about those it would be good the data loss could be avoided and they could be imported in some form or another.

(I would have looked up the issue tracker for any existing reports but bizarrely I seem unable to access the OpenOffice site a the moment.)

Thanks for the software

Posted by Alan Horkan on July 08, 2008 at 12:32 PM CEST #