Developing software (or hardware) is more rewarding if there are many potential users, now and in the future.

It might be quite nice to develop a new light bulb that is perfectly suited for the homes of Phil and his family in Punxsutawney. But it is much better to develop a new light bulb that can illuminate all homes of the world. A developer would get more help from others on this way, and there would be a wider choice of programming tools. Not to speak of any financial rewards.

You may argue that this is not possible because of the different light bulb sockets, voltages, and other technical and legal restrictions. See? That is why we need open standards that are the same wherever possible. Even for common supplies like electricity or the dimensions of nuts and bolts it is not a simple task to agree on an open standard.

• The USA agreed to use the metric system in 1866, still it is not in common public use.

• Some efforts were successful, however. September 3rd, 1967, Sweden changed the whole car traffic from left side to right side driving. That was relatively easy back in those days. Would be more difficult today. See the huge street constructions at the former Chinese/Macau border, where traffic has to change from one side to the other without crashing into each other.

Now, back to software. Is it easy to change software standards, once that people agree something should be changed? Not really. Even when people who use expensive, suppressive, proprietary de facto standards are given the chance to switch to free alternatives (free as in beer, and free as in unrestricted use), they may decide to stick to what they have.

You can take a horse to the water but you can't make him drink. But you can try to make the water so refreshing and delicious that no horse can resist.

Enter ODF. The OpenDocument Format is an approved international standard, like the meter or the second. That means that ODF based software solutions that you develop today will be valid and useful everywhere on the world, now and forever. It is not necessary to waste your time on developing exceptions for one brand of browsers or another brand of operating systems.

Imagine how a world with only open standards will look. You cannot imagine? Neither can I. But there are first steps visible everywhere.

• Extensions for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice exist for only a short time now. And already more than a hundred extensions were developed, almost all of them for free and fair use.

• The hybrid file format that is available within the Sun PDF Import extension is an example of an ingenious merger of an open standard and a publicly released de facto standard. The hybrid file format contains the same document in ODF and PDF together in one .pdf file. Users of OpenOffice.org can open this hybrid file and edit the contents like any other Writer, Calc, Draw, or Impress file, then export back to the hybrid format. Users of other PDF reader programs can open the same .pdf file and see the PDF, as they expect. (Requires at least OOo 3 Beta)
  

• Or have a look at this video by one of the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org developers which shows how to use the WebDAV support of OpenOffice.org to use Writer and Calc as editors for web sites. Perfect web sites, created and edited without the need to learn html.
  

By the way, googling for "the beauty of open standards", I found a nice blog about open standards by David A. Wheeler that is worth reading.

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