I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard on a recent episode of Dot Net Rocks! that Adobe are not going to let Microsoft release Office 2007 with a native ‘Save as PDF’ feature. This is a feature that I have been desperate to see introduced for years. I have made use of various 3rd party plugins but none have supported all the features I required and been trouble free to use. If MS and Adobe cannot reach agreement the feature will be available as a separate downloadable plugin.
Apparently Adobe want MS to charge more to customers purchasing Office 2007 and to pay a royalty to Adobe, this begs the question… Is Adobe an evil money grabbing corporation?
Adobe may be worried that their sales of PDF authoring software will be affected. I can’t really see this happening as 99% of people will buy a $30 plugin to convert their doc’s to PDF instead of a $500 Adobe tool.
Adobe’s own PDF viewer has been suffering from bloatware syndrome over the last few versions 5.0 – 7.0 and I have read a lot of people saying version 6.0 was brown and smelt funny. I have just started using FoxIT’s pdf viewer which is a 1.2 MB download. It is fast to load and feels uber responsive when navigating through documents, it is still early days so I’m not sure how robust it is yet.
I think Adobe need to listen to the humble consumers if they want to enjoy success in the consumer software mass market.
You will be able to download Microsoft’s PDF software for free. The .Net Rocks Podcast was incendiary nonsense.
I do mention that you will be able to download a plugin at the end of the first paragraph, the DNR team were giving Adobe a hard time but I agreed with a lot of what was said. Anyone who wishes to judge for themsleve you can download the show here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=182