The intended use of PDF

You certainly know that OpenOffice.org can export your documents to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). An introduction to this format can be found on the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

This format was designed as an electronic equivalent of a page printed on paper. That is, it was not designed to be a format that can be edited.

Some users still want to edit a PDF file for some reasons. Workarounds were developed to enable editing of PDF files. For example, you can print the PDF document, then scan the printed page using an OCR program, edit the results, and generate a new PDF file from them. Currently, many OCR programs can open PDF files directly, thus saving the extra steps of using a printer and a scanner.

To export the current document as PDF

1. Choose File – Export as PDF.

2. In the PDF Options dialog box, select the PDF export options, then click Export.

   The application help explains the options that you can select on the five different tab pages. 

3. In the Export dialog box, select a path and type a name for the PDF file. Click Export.

If you later want to export as PDF again using the same PDF options, you can click the Export Directly As PDF icon on the Standard toolbar. This command does not display the PDF Options dialog box.

Editing PDF files

Starting with OpenOffice.org 3.0, a new extension can be used to import a PDF file for editing. This extension is still in its early stage of development, so do not expect a perfect roundtrip from PDF to ODF and back to PDF. However, the extension can be used for first tests right now.

Currently you need a recent developer version of OOo 3.0, which is available from http://download.openoffice.org/680/ or other web sites. Keep in mind that this is not a software to be used in productive environments, it is for experimental testing only.

Once you have installed the OOo 3.0 software, you can install the PDF Import extension. Download the extension from http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

To import a PDF file to OpenOffice.org 3

1. Choose File – Open.

2. Select the PDF file and click Open.

   You may set the file type to “PDF” to shorten the list of files, or enter *.pdf into the file name field to only select from files with that extension.

In the current state of development, the PDF file opens in OpenOffice.org Draw. Each page of the PDF file is shown on a page of the Draw document. You can double-click the text boxes and edit the text, or you can move the text boxes and the images, or use any of the Draw commands and icons.

To save a document as PDF file in OOo 3

When you are ready with editing the file, you can save the document.

A click on the Save icon will show the Save As dialog box, where you can enter a name for the new Draw document that you are currently editing. This creates an ODG file but not a new PDF file. You will get a PDF file by exporting as PDF, like before:

1. To create a new PDF file, choose File – Export As PDF.

2. In the PDF Options dialog box, you may want to enable the Create Hybrid File checkbox (see below).

3. Click Export.

4. You can enter a new name for the edited PDF document, or keep the old name to overwrite the previous document.

The ODF-PDF hybrid file 

Once you have installed the PDF Import extension for OOo 3, the PDF Options dialog shows a new checkbox on the General tab page: Create Hybrid File.

A hybrid file is a PDF file that contains the document in both formats, ODF and PDF. Most PDF viewer software will ignore the ODF bits and show the hybrid file as a normal PDF file. But in OOo 3, the hybrid file will open in the same module of OOo that created the hybrid file: Writer, Calc, Impress, or Draw. So the OOo 3 user can edit the original layout of the hybrid file, in the highest possible quality without any conversion losses, and then export as PDF again.

I bet that soon there will be many hybrid ODF-PDF files on the Web. These files enable users of OpenOffice.org 3 to edit the contents without problems. Of course you can choose to disable the Create Hybrid File checkbox, thus creating a normal PDF file without the additional ODF bits.

You can browse to the OOoNinja page for a nice report about this new feature:

http://www.oooninja.com/2008/06/pdf-import-hybrid-odf-pdfs-extension-30.html